It has been just over a year since we last spoke with Herbert Retail, a company that is transforming the modern retail environment from a foundation of 260 years of history. The firm was established to sell weighing scales to retailers – and in the 1900s you could have found its products in some of the earliest branches of Sainsbury’s.
As the company has evolved, it has grown beyond simply manufacturing and selling products. Herbert Retail as it exists today is a technology integrator that works with retailers to create value-added manufacturer solutions. With a combination of technical consultancy, middleware and design work, Herbert Retail has proven itself to be an essential partner for the retail industry through electronic labelling, checkout-free solutions and weighing technology.
When we last spoke with Herbert Retail, the firm was deploying a new electronic shelf-label solution. It was the first company to deploy such a solution estate-wide for Scotmid Co-op between October 21 and 22.
Electronic shelf labelling is one of those solutions that sounds so simple you wonder why it has not been done before. The system replaces paper tickets on shelves with an electronic readout networked with the point-of-sale system. It is a system that makes changing a price or implementing a new special offer the work of minutes, rather than hours of labour.
The electronic shelf label system introduces automatic price compliance between price tags and point-of-sale. Promotions are rolled out automatically, rather than being dependent on staff.
“For a Retailer, I believe the knowledge that you can change prices across your estate in a matter of minutes, is operationally and promotionally extremely powerful,” Managing Director Claire Herbert told us last year.
The “Shelf-Label Pixies”
When we talk to Herbert again today, it sounds like the electronic shelfing system has been flying off the… well.
“The market is now starting to take off in a big way,” Herbert tells us. “Over the last year alone we have installed 2 million labels in at least 600 shops. It has been really, really, busy.”
The growth of Herbert Retail has also meant learning some important lessons.
“We have now honed our processes in terms of the implementation of shelf labels,” says Herbert. “It is a slightly complex installation process. You have to have the label in the right place, at the right time, and the stripping in the right position. We have honed our processes around that, so we are now very efficient, installing eight or nine stores a night.”
An expanding market means ever larger logistical and technical challenges, but Herbert Retail has been able to rise to that task.
“The biggest challenges have come out of dealing with that volume of logistical and project management requirements,” Herbert tells us. “We have got to cut the stripping to fit every different bay in the shop. You have to ensure everything gets to the right place at the right time, and we have definitely improved on that. Our customers have started to describe us as the ‘shelf label pixies’, because we come in at night and everything is ready for the next day.”
Capturing Value
For 40 years Herbert Retail has been a retail technology integrator, and as a result of that it has established a network of engineers around the country to manage installations and post-installation requirements.
“They are putting and picking and dispatching,” Herbert tells us. “We have tightened our processes and introduced new technologies to track assets.”
As Herbert Retail’s processes have become more refined, the use case for electronic shelf labelling systems has become increasingly self-evident.
“The return on that investment is becoming more obvious,” Herbert says. “Obviously labour saving is a big reason for implementing this. National minimum wage is increasing, there are labour shortages, and people want to change the shelves to help customers rather than increase prices to meet labour costs.”
Herbert Retail is already receiving feedback that its products are generating profit margins through increased promotional accuracy alone.
“At the moment most retailers have no visibility on how much that actually happens,” says Herbert. “They don’t have access to that information, and often bigger stores do not even get around to putting on the promotion across all their stores. It is becoming more obvious that this is a platform for productivity enhancement.”
As well as consistency on pricing and promotions, electronic shelf labelling is introducing new functionalities such as “Pick by Light” and “Put by Light” functions that will cause labels to flash, directing staff towards the products they need to take to fulfil online shopping orders, or towards the shelves they need to stack products onto. As the technology continues to grow and develop, that functionality will only grow.
“I think electronic shelf labelling has a way to go in the UK, and we want to be the number one implementation partner for these products,” Herbert says. “Retailers want to be able to capture that value on an ongoing basis for the next ten years. That is why we provide post-installation replenishment, re-kitting and storage. We supply all the services around the product to capture the value of electronic shelf labels on an ongoing basis.”
This ability to capture and enable value is what makes Herbert Retail far more than a simple technology supplier.
“We are an enabler of this technology,” Herbert says simply. “We are developing the ability to integrate these labels with camera technology to spot out-of-stock products, or enable payment through the shelf labels. The possibilities of these labels as a platform for productivity and user engagement are endless.”
