The Challenge
Boden first approached Asendia in 1995 and wanted to tap into the potentially lucrative French market in 2011. They required a reliable returns service and a solution for distributing its direct mail and catalogues.
The Solution
Asendia handles approximately 1,000 catalogue requests a month via Boden’s website and fulfils them from its 100,000 sq. ft. fulfilment and mailing facility in Bedford. We also polywrap and mail approximately 200,000 Boden catalogues a year to UK overseas customers (i.e. British ex-pats living abroad). We provide catalogue storage, process and capture data of catalogue requests and postal responses, and have automated the processing of data set up by our in-house software developers.
We also print and dispatch postcard mailings for local clearance sales in locations such as town halls. We send mail for UK distribution on our 2 day definite downstream access delivery service, switching from Royal Mail to save money on postage. As far as the French market is concerned, Asendia provides a postal routing solution to Boden for the distribution to French addresses of more than 400,000 catalogues a year, via La Poste’s Destineo Integral MD7 service. We also provide the outbound distribution of their parcels via La Poste’s Priority Mail and the returns management via Colissimo, another service by La Poste.
Asendia is able to supply a seamless catalogue processing service for Boden, as well as offering competitive postage rates and service to and from France. More importantly for French consumers, the service is seen as local because of the La Poste postmark and address formatting. This increases response rates. Our 2 day definite service enabled Boden to gear up their order processing centre for the UK, confident that the direct mail will have landed. Handling so many posted catalogues a year and by utilising our unsorted DSA postage service in the UK we saved Boden £40,000 against Royal Mail’s second class service. Through our data cleansing service we saved them thousands of pounds on wasted postage too.
