Jockey

Page Industries is value-driven manufacturing, marketing, and distribution company operating in India for 25 years. It’s the franchisee of the Jockey and Speedo brands in India and six neighboring countries, including Sri Lanka and the United Arab Emirates. Capitalizing on India’s growing demand for high-quality apparel, Page Industries has set an internal goal of $1 billion in revenue in the next 5 years. It’s currently halfway to achieving this aim.

Challenge 

Until 2020, the lion’s share of Page Industries’ Jockey sales was through brick-and-mortar retail outlets. Online sales through marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart were managed via custom application programming interface (API) integrations. As online sales increased, the manual effort required to manage code changes for each marketplace was becoming a bottleneck for Page Industries’ IT team. Even the smallest code update required at least an hour of work, and when bugs occurred, it could take Page Industries 6–8 hours to debug and determine the root cause. When online sales jumped about 500 percent in 2020, implementing an automated aggregator solution became a top priority.

Initiatives

Page Industries approached Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Vinculum Group, a software company enabling omnichannel retailing, to provide an aggregator platform that would simplify and automate marketplace integrations. Karn Singh, head of eCommerce operations at Page Industries, says, “Vinculum’s solutions are pre-integrated to work with multiple marketplaces across the different countries in which we operate. This opens the door to building our business in India and abroad.”

In the run-up to selecting and implementing the Vinculum solution, Page Industries often had to pause selling on marketplaces until issues were fixed to avoid too many orders being canceled. Most marketplaces where Page Industries sells its products maintain service-level agreements (SLA) stipulating vendors must stay below a certain cancellation rate. Thus, halting sales periodically to fix bugs was preferable to canceling orders outright, but the opportunity cost of lost orders was high, even for minor technical glitches.

Result

In addition to stability, the scalability of the Vinculum solution has made it possible for Page Industries to serve more customers. Previously, Page Industries was selling its 15,000 Jockey SKUs on 4 to 5 marketplaces, whereas now the company is selling on 10 major marketplace sites. Orders tend to spike over the weekend, from 1,000–10,000 per second, all of which require processing simultaneously. On average, the business is now successfully handling six times higher order volumes per month compared to business levels pre-pandemic.