The site at Moulton Park Industrial Estate, Northampton was chosen because of its ‘Golden Triangle’ location, the biggest concentration of major logistics and distribution operations in Europe. It has good access to the M1, M40, M6 and M40 putting 90% of the population of England and Wales within reach in four hours, enabling Whistl to potentially offer online retailers a later cut off time for their customer’s orders for next day delivery.
The 155k sqft purpose-built depot will be fitted out to enable pick and pack of customer orders. The site has parking for 27 HGVs and has 15 dock doors and 3 level access points. Alongside its expanding pick and pack and returns warehouse capability, Whistl has expanded into Contact Centres and providing Warehouse and Carrier Management Systems with easy integration or plug into retailer’s existing IT or order management systems.
Northampton and the expanded Rushton site join Whistl’s other fulfilment centres located in Farnborough and Gateshead giving it over 700k sqft fulfilment capacity across the UK.
Whistl entered the e-commerce fulfilment and contact centres market through the acquisition of Prism DM in 2017 and expanded its presence the following year by the acquisition of Spark Response and Spark Etail. The company is quickly building its presence in fulfilment working with companies including fast growing online retailers Brand Alley, Sports Pursuit, Shark Ninja and Microscooters. The £650m turnover company is targeting medium sized B2C and B2B retailers with a single account managed end to end fulfilment solution.
The most recent figures available, show that 50% of the UK’s £80bn annual retail purchases require fulfilment and that the efulfilment market is worth £11lbn and has experienced a 15% year on year growth rate in the past five years.
Nick Wells, CEO Whistl, said:
Through Whistl Fulfilment we are bringing our people, our operational excellence and reputation for first class customer management to medium sized retailers who require an agile and scalable partner who can manage every aspect of the fulfilment process from placing an order to delivery to the consumer. We have a range of proven flexible and customisable services available depending on the requirements of the retailer.
We understand that fulfilment and delivery is part of the brand experience for consumers and everyone within the company is passionate about doing the best we can to ensure that we deliver on the retailers brand promise.
Whistl is a £600m+ revenue, delivery management company that provides mail, parcels, leaflet advertising, fulfilment and contact services in the UK and internationally. Headquartered in Marlow, the Whistl group of companies operate across the UK, and handles in excess of 3.6bn items a year.
