Delivering for peak: how fashion retail is going the extra mile this Christmas

Peak season is in full swing for fashion retail. Key shopping dates are just around the corner and include Black Friday (25 November), Cyber Monday (28 November), the Christmas shopping rush and New Year sales.

It is the season when delivery companies can expect to be stretched to the maximum as customers shop online.

With an estimated 38% of fashion purchases made online in the past 24 months, according to the British Retail Consortium’s BRC-KPMG retail sales monitor, the efficiency and cost of last mile solutions have become key to a successful “golden quarter” for retailers.

Sustainability is also on the industry's mind. The BRC’s Climate Action Roadmap, developed in partnership with retailers, states that low carbon logistics is one of the five pillars towards a retail industry commitment to deliver net zero carbon emissions in individual operations and products sold by 2040, ahead of the government’s 2050 target for a Net Zero UK.

Brands such as Zara, Reskinned, Selfridges, THG and giants Ikea and Amazon are among those now experimenting with sustainable last mile solutions, such as electric cargo bike deliveries in city centres.

These can be a cost effective and more efficient way to deliver product, avoiding traffic snarl ups and navigating through clean air and congestion charging zones in cities. Brands tell Drapers that they are looking more to last mile solutions as a customer retention tool, rather than a disconnected part of the shopping process. Delivery could be the only touchpoint that a customer has with the retailer, and a cargo bike delivery fulfilment could give a halo effect to the brand.

A pioneer of the ebike delivery method is electric cargo bike delivery business Zedify, which is gearing up for the busy peak trading period. It will open its tenth hub in Birmingham on 25 October, and plans to expand out to 51 major UK cities in the next five years.

With electric cargo bikes, fuel costs are minimised and the vehicle cost itself is lower compared with vans, says Zedify CEO and co-founder Rob King. He adds that cargo bikes can use cycle infrastructure in cities and park closer to delivery addresses, avoiding parking fines and congestion charges, resulting in more efficient deliveries.

Little data is available yet on the effectiveness of electric cargo bikes for delivery, partly because cargo bike activity is not separated from other cycle types in statistics. However, momentum is building and delivery companies including Amazon and Evri are experimenting with deliveries by electric cargo bike. Evri plans to have 3,000 bikes over the next decade to reduce carbon emissions across its network and become a net zero company by 2035.

New brands have recently come on board with Zedify pre-peak, including beauty distributor THG Ingenuity, the technology services arm of THG, the e-commerce group behind beauty brands such as Lookfantastic and former owner of Coggles. It started deliveries with Zedify from the Manchester hub in September, and will be ramping up in peak, says Tom Killeen, COO at THG Ingenuity,

Killeen says consumers increasingly want brands to embrace sustainable practices, and brands need to consider the bigger picture on logistics.

“We believe that fulfilment should be seen as a customer acquisition tool, rather than simply a vehicle to drive down costs within a business. Businesses can spend as much as £30 acquiring a customer but throw it away for the sake of a few pennies in providing a poor delivery experience.”

Etailer Reskinned, which sells pre-loved clothes from 35 brands such as Seasalt and Sweaty Betty, is also working with Zedify for the first time in London this year.

Matt Hanrahan, the co-founder of Reskinned says that change is long overdue in last mile logistics, as currently items may be shipped up to a central consolidation hub to be redistributed back out again. “There is a lot of bad practice in shipping deliveries up from London to the golden triangle in the Midlands and then back down again, so a two-mile delivery becomes 200 unnecessary miles.”

He says Zedify deliveries come at maybe a 10% premium for Reskinned but it absorbs the cost “as part of our manifesto to reduce carbon impact.”

“For us at Reskinned it is all about sustainability and reuse, and logistics is the biggest carbon generator, so we always look for the most sustainable logistics partners.”

Reskinned tries to manage customer’s delivery expectations with its formula and does not offer next day delivery: “We don’t believe that people need pre-loved clothing so urgently. We do 48 hours at a £2.85 charge, with no free returns so that we don’t have to build the cost of returns into pricing, we have transparent pricing.”

Generally, the cost of Zedify’s deliveries to businesses are in line with standard van alternatives, says King, although Zedify needs to build scale and density to minimise delivery price points.

Zedify riders do smaller routes than vans and multiple times a day, which can allow it to catch customers more easily. King says it has a first-time delivery success rate of around 96%.

During Christmas peak, one of the levers Zedify might use to react to spikes in demand might be to flex delivery windows, working with customers to agree timeslots, King says.

Packages are not more than 4-5kg and around £30 to £50 in value and shoebox sized. A rider could take 50-100 parcels on one round, he explains. Vans and electric vans meanwhile can take bigger and mixed package types and more of them in one round.

Scheduling and fulfilment at peak is data driven, says Tom Killeen at THG Ingenuity: “We monitor data in real-time to maximise throughput and increase dispatch speed. We have data scientists working with machine learning models to predict demand based on trends.”

In the future, enhanced data collection will be able to provide more granular tracking information on deliveries, believes Killeen, offering better visibility on both emissions data and real-time parcel locations, ultimately increasing consumer convenience.

With reduction in emissions transport high on the agenda for retailers and transport operators alike, cargo bikes and electric cargo bikes look set to become an option of choice in cities.

In London, local government body Transport for London (TfL) published an action plan in March 2023, on promoting and enabling the growth of cargo bikes.

The report identifies some of the challenges of the growth of cargo bike deliveries which include that fact that a rise in use of cargo bikes will put existing cycle lanes under pressure and kerbside capacity as well.

It also considers the safety aspects and the importance of establishing minimum and best-practice safety and training standards for cargo bikes, riders and operators.

Potential safety concerns highlighted include concerns about the personal safety of the rider, for example in secluded areas, and aggressive and close passing by motorists on roads.

The TfL report sets out an action plan to tackle these issues, saying that it wants to make cargo bikes London’s leading option for last-mile freight trips, to reduce carbon emissions in the city.

With online shopping accounting for more than a third of fashion sales, retailers are also scrutinising last mile logistics and ways to embrace and enhance delivery as part of the whole customer journey.

However lovely the product and competitive the pricing, a late or unsatisfactory delivery will be what customers remember, especially at peak season when stress levels rise.

If electric cargo bikes can cut through congestion and deliver a positive environmental message about the brand alongside the goods ordered, then the new year promises to see more of them on city streets.