Case Study
Cutter & Buck
Cutter & Buck Achieves Record Sales with AutoStore
Country
USA
Industry
Retail
Partner
Kardex Holding AG
With a top-quality product gaining ground everywhere, Cutter & Buck needed a scalable logistics upgrade to help them keep up with demand and make the most of their resources. For results sure to meet their expectations, they turned to AutoStore, an automated storage and retrieval system that propelled the company toward its most profitable peak season in their 35-year history.
Over the course of three decades, Cutter & Buck, a subsidiary of New Wave Group, AB, has become a byword for high quality and comfort in activewear. From relatively modest beginnings on the Seattle waterfront, the clothing brand has grown to incorporate more products with the latest features, which are available on golf courses, resorts, fan shops, and online stores across the globe. After installing AutoStore at their suburban Seattle fulfillment center, the company set a new sales record in 2023 while making room for even more business growth.
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Cutter & Buck’s products include clothing perfect for those interested in boating, golfing, hiking, or showing their support for their favorite MLB, NFL, or NCAA sports franchises. With the option of decorating sportswear with custom embroidery, it has become a fashion retail giant, recognizable in stadiums, on the golf course, and throughout corporate boardrooms across the world.
Their sales strategy — combining direct-to-consumer sales through their website with licensed vendors at sports venues and other businesses — has fueled Cutter & Buck’s incredible success. However, that steady growth, along with an expanding inventory to meet demand, left the company’s existing logistics infrastructure at risk of falling behind.
Operating out of a 180,000-sf facility considered state-of-the-art when it was built in 2000, Cutter & Buck's fulfillment process was labor-intensive and time-consuming. Orders were picked directly into shipping boxes, and employees had to walk through multiple floors, which was inefficient. This process often led to bottlenecks, especially during peak times.
With sales on the rise and increasingly limited space, Cutter & Buck determined that they needed a more efficient automated warehouse system to handle business demands.
“Our customer base wants their orders really to ship same-day if they're undecorated. And if they're decorated, they want those orders to ship in just a couple of days,” said Cutter & Buck CEO Joel Freet, highlighting the need for a more efficient system.
"We were just running out of daylight."
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Cutter & Buck's affiliation with New Wave Group provided them insight into the benefits of AutoStore. Initial site visits to New Wave AutoStores operating in Europe gave the American executives a good understanding about the system's pace. They realized that the steady, methodical approach of the automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) was exactly what they needed to speed delivery to their customers.
"It turned out later that you just don't have to run around that much when you're using an AutoStore system," Freet noted.
Construction entailed floor grinding and Grid erection around six support columns with a ceiling fire suppression system. Installation and system integration by AutoStore partner Kardex took only a few weeks to complete without any downtime to fulfillment operations. All in all, the project was seamless and turned out to be a perfect fit for the 24-year-old building.
“It looks like the building was designed to have the AutoStore right where it is,” remarked Scott Sumpter, Executive Director of Distribution, Enhancement, and Logistics at Cutter & Buck.
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Based on a Grid system, with storage Bins stacked vertically under a Grid rail network to allow Robots to access inventory, AutoStore can increase storage capacity by a factor of 4 and performance by up to 10 times more than that offered by traditional logistics models. In addition, with only 17 standardized parts, the Grid can be configured to fit any warehouse space while remaining expandable to accommodate further growth or demand in peak periods.
With 2 ConveyorPorts for induction, 9 CarouselPorts for picking, 54 Red Line Robots, and 36,000 Bins, the Cutter & Buck system takes up only about 10,000 sf of the overall footprint, a layout designed to meet the company’s five-year growth plan with ample space to scale.
“We have an abundance of capacity right now,” said Sumpter.
Furthermore, with enough Robots, alternating charging times open up the possibility of switching to 24/7 operation, thus enabling Cutter & Buck to meet substantial increases in orders during peak periods. This can be particularly valuable during holiday periods when demand spikes, helping the company to keep customers satisfied and their growth unchecked.
Cutter & Buck’s fulfillment operation involves breaking down whole-case shipments of blank garments into individual pieces and inducting them into the AutoStore Grid. Blank orders are picked, scanned, packed, and passed from CarouselPorts onto a connected conveyor system to shipping. Custom orders go to the adjacent embroidery section where specialized teams “hoop” and load garments onto automated embroidery machines. After decoration is complete, goods are steam-pressed, packed, and shipped.
The implementation of AutoStore revolutionized this complex, time-consuming operation by eliminating the picking bottleneck. Today, Cutter & Buck can ship out a customized garment in only 25 hours and blanks go out almost immediately.
“We can have an order that comes into one of our websites, into a pick ticket, picked, packed, and on our way in less than 10 minutes,” said Freet.
Manhattan Associates warehouse management system (WMS) software directs material flow throughout the building. Kardex FulfillX, a warehouse execution system (WES) purpose-built to extend the WMS capabilities for AutoStore systems, further optimizes the complex process of managing bulk inventory and the two different workstreams, simultaneously.
“Kardex has been especially helpful because we decorate product and ship blank product. We needed to create a number of different order types within the Kardex system so that they could come out to specific Ports,” said Sumpter.
“We didn't want to have totes that would go to embroidery at the same Port that we had blank orders coming out.”
AutoStore has an accuracy rate of 99%, and thereby eliminated Cutter & Buck’s need for cycle counting. The system provides precise knowledge of available stock at all times, giving them a constant trust of their inventory levels and further streamlining their operations.
"We have exact knowledge of how many units we have in every single SKU that's available to ship that day. So we know exactly what we have all the time," said Freet.
Located in an area of the American Northwest that prides itself on the use of hydroelectric power, sustainability is a significant focus for Cutter & Buck. The AutoStore system is energy efficient, using less electricity than most alternatives and regenerating energy during operation.
“I believe 10 robots use the energy of one home vacuum cleaner,” Sumpter pointed out, emphasizing the system's sustainability benefits.
Moreover, the system has improved the working environment for employees, reducing the physical strain of walking multiple warehouse levels and lowering noise levels in the facility.
“It’s a much more tranquil place to work,” said Freet.
The adoption of AutoStore has led to remarkable financial performance improvements. In 2023, Cutter & Buck experienced their largest and most profitable fourth quarter in history following the system's implementation.
"A large part of that is built on the speed and the efficiency that we get through all of our processes, and the cornerstone of that process here at this operation is AutoStore," said Freet.
Sumpter said the experience demonstrates the transformative potential of the AutoStore system for businesses looking to optimize their operations and meet growing customer demands.
“We couldn't have delivered what the customer wants without AutoStore with the growth track that we were on. The partnership with Kardex/AutoStore has been critical to our success.”
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Project Specifications:
"AutoStore helped us to have the largest, most profitable fourth-quarter that we’ve ever had in the history of Cutter&Buck. A large part of that is built on the speed and the efficiency that we get through all of our processes, and the cornerstone of that process here at this operation is AutoStore."
“We really like the speed and flexibility that AutoStore gives us. [...] The AutoStore fulfillment is usually in single-digit minutes. We can have an order via our website picked, packed and ready for shipment in less than 10 minutes."
"I would definitely encourage anyone seeking more capacity, scalability, or cost savings to choose AutoStore and Kardex."
"A big win for us was that we did not have any downtime between systems. [...] The AutoStore module goes up in just a few weeks."
AutoStore can fit any warehouse or fulfillment center. Make yours the next.
