AutoStore™ Future-Proofs Adore Me

Morgan Hermand-Waiche began playing with the idea of establishing a lingerie company when he was still a student at Harvard Business School in 2010. At the time, he was in his second year of doing a master's degree in business administration.

Not intimidated by all the other lingerie brands already out there, he aimed to provide high-quality, affordable lingerie to consumers online. And so, in 2012, he launched his lingerie brand and called it 'Adore Me.' 

Some of Hermand-Waiche's professors were among his first investors.

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Fast growth in first few years

The company grew very quickly. In 2013, Adore Me achieved sales of $5.6 million and three times that amount in the following year, 2014. By 2016, the company’s revenue was over $83 million.

Adore Me initially sold lingerie, sleepwear, and swimwear and has become known for its wide range of size options in all these categories – from petite to plus size. In 2016, they also launched an activewear collection. The brand is known for its fast fashion, a concept based on replicating catwalk trends and high-fashion designs and mass producing them at a low cost. 

Adore Me mainly sells its products online. However, in 2016, the company began to sell their merchandise in Nordstrom stores across America. In 2018, they opened their first bricks-and-mortar store in the Staten Island Mall, New York. 

Over the next few years, they plan to open 300 more stores.

20,000 orders per day with AutoStore

Adore Me’s new distribution center in Secaucus, New Jersey, is 11,732 square meters (126,286 square feet) in size. The team has installed an AutoStore warehouse automation system, empowered by Bastian Solutions, that uses Robots and a grid containing densely stacked bins to make the processing of orders as easy and effective as possible. They also make use of Opex SureSort automated delivery sorting. Together, these two systems enable the warehouse to fulfill 20,000 orders per day.

This number is four times the volume seen in traditional distribution centers, where goods are typically packed in shelves with aisles running in between and where much of the picking and the packing is done manually.

“Building our own cutting-edge distribution center has been a fundamental stepping stone in being able to deliver an omnichannel experience,” says Hermand-Waiche.

What the AutoStore system looks like

The new automated warehouse system has enabled the company to bring their order fulfillment operations in-house, rather than relying on third-party fulfillment. Approximately 100 employees work at the distribution center, 75% of whom are female - a philosophy in line with Adore Me's female-empowerment missions.

The easy-to-operate system consists of:

• 73 Robots
• 33,000 Bins
• 11 Workstations 
• Three receiving stations with touch-screen monitors
• Automatic labeling machines
• Three different types of conveyor belts

The advantages of AutoStore 

The benefits of installing the AutoStore system have been many. Notably, it includes fulfilling four times the number of orders that would be feasible in a conventional distribution center, as storage space is now fully maximized. The team has also dramatically reduced their shipping times.

AutoStore has also made it possible for Adore Me to keep up with its rapidly growing order volume, as the warehouse system can easily be expanded to accommodate an increase in orders.

Morgan Hermand-Waiche adds: “The opening of the new distribution center marks a very important and exciting milestone for Adore Me, as it will help to fuel our growth for the future.”