Company overview
Sharp as a Knife is the D2C branch of a well-known company that has been in business for over 50 years. They specialize in providing high-quality knives, blades, scissors, kitchen goods, and outdoor living accessories.
Their D2C model is the result of the wider shift taking place in supply chains. Across many sectors, the entire supply model is becoming more consumer-focused. Traditional roles are changing, and there’s a greater emphasis on the importance of marketplaces for reaching customers.
Sharp as a Knife’s consumer focus includes the manufacturing of their own products, in addition to the quality brands they already sell. By taking on a manufacturing role, while also being intimately connected to the consumer, they are better able to provide the quality products their customers demand.
Marketplaces are becoming the dominant shopping method for the new digital consumer, who routinely uses marketplaces as a search engine to find what they want - now.
Sharp as a Knife takes a fresh approach that uses D2C marketplace selling as a central strategy. This way they have been able to rapidly expand sales in new markets, and reach customers that were inaccessible before.
In just a few short years, the business has grown from launching its first website (only six years ago!) to becoming a multinational retailer with a presence on key marketplaces. This winning strategy is bringing the company even closer to the customer. It is also helping to reshape their role as a serious contender in a thriving retail and Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) market.
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The situation
With an eye on expanding their reach into new markets, Sharp as a Knife had already taken the step of starting selling on marketplaces. This had broadened their reach into the Benelux countries. Still, with over 11,000 different products in their portfolio, they recognized that branching out into yet more marketplaces and countries would require much time using their old methods.
Sharp as a Knife was already selling successfully on Bol.com in both The Netherlands and Belgium. Still, it wanted to expand its sales even further by optimizing their sales and reaching customers on different marketplaces and in other countries.
To achieve their ambitions, Sharp as a Knife would require more powerful tools that could manage a growing portfolio of products and a wider range of sales channels across Europe - and beyond. They needed to automate time-consuming processes such as entering new products on marketplaces and managing inventory levels across multiple channels.
The solution
In April 2020, Sharp as a Knife started to use ChannelEngine as a marketplace integration solution, beginning with key marketplaces in the Benelux region.
Sharp as a Knife has found ChannelEngine to be incredibly powerful once it is all set up. The time savings for all those regular processes have translated into greater productivity and efficiency.
Sharp as a Knife’s Product and Marketplace Manager, Rob van Gurp, has some crucial advice for retailers who want their implementation of ChannelEngine to go as smoothly as possible: focus on the product data to ensure it matches all the requirements. Rob continues, “The first thing to address before you integrate is to make sure your data is correct – know your data and how it needs to work with ChannelEngine.”
Next steps
Last year, Sharp as a Knife focused on learning how to use ChannelEngine and exploring options for marketplace sales. This year, their focus will be on optimizing sales and possibly expanding into new marketplaces as well.
They’re also looking into automating even more of their current processes to boost efficiencies and ensure uniform quality.
Are they going to keep using ChannelEngine? You bet they are! “We definitely plan to go on with ChannelEngine…it is still the most mature [of the available integration solutions]”, asserts Rob.
Sharp as a Knife takes a measured approach that reflects its company values and its dedication to providing consistent and reliable quality and service. In the medium term, they see new opportunities for expansion across the EU and into the UK. They also plan to start selling on carefully selected new marketplaces such as Amazon, Blokker, VidaXL.
Given their success with using ChannelEngine over the past year, we’re confident they’ll achieve excellent results in these new areas too!
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