Who knows the needs of the furniture trade better than the trade itself? When wholesaler Baumhaus was unable to find a delivery service operating to the high standards it required, it ended up launching its own …
Today, Kinetic Logistics delivers furniture, electricals and other fragile goods to hundreds of UK retailers, including Wayfair and Costco. Based in Upper Heyford near Bicester – together with Baumhaus – the service provider offers warehousing, drop shipping and home deliveries, and is meeting growing demand for two-man, white-glove, room-of-choice deliveries.
“Kinetic Logistics was born out of the requirement of our furniture company,” says director Phil Dickens, who works across both businesses. “Absolutely nobody operated to the delivery standards we needed – safety, order trails, etc – so we had to do it ourselves.”
Phil explains how Baumhaus bought its own fleet – and when his trade customers started asking if they could use his delivery services themselves, Kinetic was born.
“The company was set up for furniture people, by furniture people,” he says, “so we know where the headaches lie.” Customer confusion, onerous administrative duties, poorly-timed deliveries, goods damaged in transit … the list of things which can (and, too often, do) go wrong during a furniture delivery is endless. By marrying its trade experience with new technology, Kinetic set out to eliminate these complaints, and earned itself a reputation for product care, customer service and reliability.
“Our operation is highly automated, which eliminates mistakes,” says Phil. “Indeed, our delivery success rate on the first attempt is 94% – and, as far as we know, our returns rate is the best in the industry, at 0.01%.”
Aside from deliveries to Ireland and northern Scotland, Kinetic only utilises its own drivers. Each vehicle is installed with a minimum of three CCTV cameras to ensure there’s no mishandling, and the product packaging is checked for damage at multiple stages of each journey, ensuring full accountability. Customers can check the progress of their delivery at every stage via Kinetic’s intuitive user app, minimising frustration and miscommunication.
“We handle customer service ourselves,” says Phil, “and it’s a seamless process.”
Kinetic is also able to anticipate and overcome certain industry-specific foibles. “Furniture deliveries often come in multiple packages, and unless they’re labelled effectively, it’s not difficult for one of these to go missing,” says Phil. “We have our own advanced track-and-trace system that works incredibly well – if it didn’t, Costco wouldn’t trust us to deliver their top-of-the-range 4K televisions!”
Kinetic’s customer base covers retailers and suppliers, bricks-and-mortar and online. “The reliability of our pick-up speed is particularly important for our ecommerce clients,” says Phil. “The punctuality of drop shipping is imperative for companies which don’t hold their own stock.
“The majority of our customer base is now quite tech-savvy, and these companies have solid infrastructures behind them,” he adds, noting that Kinetic has offered full integration and EDI (electronic data exchange) for over a decade. “The bigger retailers tend to offer service providers the ability to integrate with their systems, but few take advantage of this opportunity to simplify the entire operation and remove the need for manual input.”
Thanks to its unrivalled industry insight and technological nous, this home delivery specialist is making good headway in a world in which fulfilment is fast becoming king.
