Case study: Treasury Wine Estates - Melbourne

Background

Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) is one of the world’s largest wine companies, with 70 plus brands throughout Australia, Asia, the Americas and Europe. TWE has a high-end wine boutique located in the heart of luxury retail - Collins St, Melbourne. The boutique showcases all of their top-end brands (such as Penfolds, Wynns and Devils Lair), as well as their household name brands (such as Lindemans and Blossom Hill).

Reasons for implementation

The store services staff, friends and family, and is used for tastings and many different events. Playing host to so many different types of customers, TWE needed a way to instantly change the product pricing structure to match who was in-store. For example, one day TWE may be running a Friends & Family sale event, whereas the next, they’ll require all products to show standard discounted staff pricing.

“With hundreds of different wines in-store, I’d estimate that it took 2-3 hours to change all the paper labels,” stated Ian Pearson, TWE’s Direct to Consumer Operations Manager. “So, when the Director of our business unit saw electronic labels at another bottle shop, he was inspired by the ability to dynamically update pricing for all labels at once.”

One of the biggest challenges they faced with paper tickets was ensuring that pricing was kept in sync with their POS. Often the level of effort to update the paper tickets was deemed too high, meaning that the price labels didn’t always display up-to-date promotional information, and therefore did not match the price at checkout. From an operational perspective this is less than ideal, but it also affected sales as well, with customers often unaware of the promotions that were running.

Client selection criteria

“Future Shelf (formerly esLabels) were selected as the solutions partner for the project, based on their strong experience in Australian retail, competitive pricing and also local support,” Ian stated.

“They provided an efficient and comprehensive service, from project consultation, to installation and training. We had a really tight timeline for the project but Future Shelf were extremely responsive and easy to work with,” Ian continued.

Solution

The exact electronic labels selected were size Large, epaper labels, with a black, white and red screen display. A range of templates were developed matching TWE’s branding. These show RRP pricing, discounted customer pricing, the brand, wine name, vineyard location and even tasting notes and awards. “Visually the electronic labels have added a ‘wow’ factor to the store,” Ian commented.

After the initial installation and set up, all that’s required for the ongoing running of the solution is for TWE to use a PDA to bind/unbind labels in-store, as they update their products over time.

“With the solution that Future Shelf has delivered, we are now easily able to ensure that the pricing on the labels is kept in sync with the POS. We can perform bulk updates of all the information on our labels via a spreadsheet, which we drag and drop onto an FTP folder and within minutes all our electronic labels are updated!”

The solution also encompasses automated price changes, so that TWE can configure promotions with a start and end date. Using such a strategy means that the promotional pricing will publish automatically to the ESLs at a given time, and switch back to standard pricing when the promotion has finished. “We’re excited about this initiative, as it makes the solution even more hands-off, promotional campaigns can be configured ahead of time, which is great for planning and operational efficiency,” Ian stated.

Outcomes

The solution has delivered exactly what TWE hoped for. They can now change prices as required, depending on which type of customer (staff, friends, family etc) they have in store that day. A task that used to take 2-3 hours, is now completed in minutes, so, from an operational perspective TWE couldn’t be happier.

“The biggest benefit of the Future Shelf solution is that it gives us the ability to easily update pricing to ensure it is aligned with the POS, which allows us to run far more promotions than we used to; and also increases our conversion rate, as more customers are aware of the products that are on promotion, due to this being called out on the labels. Another significant benefit is the time-saving in not having to maintain the paper labels,” Ian summarised.