How historic company Ogden Fibres became…. Ogden Fulfilment! Part 2

15/05/2014 | Share:

Part 1 of this blog can be found here

And how we became… Ogden Fulfilment?

Diversification

As part of a regular review of the financial and operational “strengths and weaknesses”,  we as a firm realised that the gross margin as a manufacturing business here in the Western world was being affected by the existence of cheaper labour economies elsewhere.

We also realised that we could evolve to use our skill set and assets here in the UK to create new income streams.

The idea of a storage business came about via serendipity. A friend of Garry’s asked him to store products for him in Ogden Fibres very large building.

With careful analysis we realised that the return and gross margin on that activity would be better than we could achieve through manufacturing.

Therefore we decided to start by offering a storage solution to professional services companies such as solicitors.

However a storage business is “limited” by the size of our building. Once the building is full, you can’t rent out any more space.

But we realised that if we were renting out storage space, we could also rent out the expertise we have as a manufacturing business.

So, rather than just storing boxes we decided to launch Ogden Fulfilment which is a service utilising our capability and ability to move product around the world for the benefit of our customers.

In 2013 we made the move from our original location with Ogden Fibres at Becks Mill to our 20,000 sq foot warehouse at the Acre Park industrial estate Keighley, where we are now based.

What can we achieve for our customers that they can’t achieve for themselves?

We save our customers large amounts of time and money.  The basis of Ogden Fulfilment is that you use our warehouse, our employees, and our know-how to move your product around the world.

This activity is what we do in our manufacturing business every day. The cost of all of the expertise and resource to do this fulfilment has been paid for via our business over many years. We help our customers avoid that pain.

The benefit to anyone who wants to sell via the Internet, or who wants to move their products around the globe, is that you don’t tie-up any of your own capital trying to do the order fulfilment yourself.

You use our building, our employees and our expertise to receive and deliver your product. You pay for the service as you need it, rather than having huge investment costs up front and full time overheads thereafter.

Isn’t this a better way of using your money to help you grow your business?