By Justine Irish D. Tabile, Reporter
FASHION RETAILER Golden ABC, Inc., which trades under the Penshoppe brand, said it is banking on an automated distribution operation to support the growth of its bricks-and-mortar stores.
Bryan Liu, vice-president for strategy and operations at Golden ABC, said: “In the past few years, one of our biggest changes was the way we operate our back end. So we invested in a huge and highly automated distribution center,” he said.
“There are robotics, and there are things in play in that facility that will make us more efficient and allow us to serve our stores and customers better,” he added.
He added that the pandemic pushed the company to improve coordination across the end-to-end value chain to be a lot more efficient and serve customers a lot better.
“Very recently, we also really spent a lot more time revisiting how we develop our products. We have invested a lot more time and effort in how we develop our products, our brands, and our stores,” he added.
He also said that artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the initiatives driving the company today.
“Given that our vision is to be a more AI-driven company. We are really focusing a lot on our data, and the way that we collect, structure, store, and consume data is now a big part of how we operate in the company,” he added.
Golden ABC is also the company behind brands such as OXGN, Forme, Memo, Regatta, and BOCU.
Brandon Liu, newly appointed vice-president for Penshoppe, said in a statement “We’ve built Penshoppe to resonate globally while staying rooted in Filipino identity.”
“As we move forward, our focus is to remain as relevant as ever — and to keep delivering what our customers expect from us as a market leader: on-trend fashion, culturally attuned collaborations, and brand experiences that are both globally competitive and uniquely our own,” he said.
He said the company is always on the lookout for what its customers need.
“Our success in the past few years has also been attributed to being able to stay relevant to the consumer; otherwise, we might not be as good in terms of the position we are in now,” he added.
He said Penshoppe currently caters to a young demographic, “but we are trying to challenge that, in the sense that it is not just targeting the youth but really people who are looking for great value products at affordable pricing.”
“We are leading it back to the brand values and what we stand for. I don’t want to box it in terms of demographics; it actually depends on where you are in life as well,” he added.
Looking forward, he said the company is exploring better ways of working, including how to bring about better products, brands, and store experiences.
“Those things are always something that we are looking at on how we can improve. Even entries into new territories or new categories, for example, are something that we always study,” he said.
“In this ever-changing industry of fashion, we do not have a crystal ball, but then it is in our approach and how we do things. We always make it a point to find out what is important to our customer,” he added.
He said the process of figuring out what customers are looking for “is changing, and there is really no way to predict it, but again, we know, and we have the experience here, especially in the Philippines, to know what the tendencies of what our customers may be looking at are and what is important to them.”
“It is really being able to adapt even with TikTok … More than just using it as a social media platform, people are shopping on TikTok. So it is also being able to know how we can approach it, how we can do this live selling and approach it through something that still makes sense for the brand,” he added.
He said that accessibility in terms of price points and nationwide reach will continue to play a key part for Penshoppe.
“We are still very strong in terms of our physical stores … I’ll admit there are a lot of things we can still improve on, from how we translate in-store experience down to online, that integration,” he added.