How Emma Bridgewater Recoups £10k Per Month

"Fair to say, we're absolutely thrilled with the impact Claimit has had on our business in such a short space of time."

Emma Bridgewater, the UK's iconic pottery brand, has been the market leader in classic crockery for over three decades - hand-crafting its wares in pottery's traditional home, Stoke-on-Trent. But after a rising number of billing errors and shipment issues, Emma Bridgewater turned to a modern solution: automated claims.

Instead of manually fighting each invoice discrepancy or filing each courier damage report, Emma Bridgewater automated the process with Claimit, leading to an 80% success rate for damaged shipments and recouping £10k per month.

We spoke with Simon Phillips, Emma Bridgewater's Logistics Director, to ask him about the difference Claimit has made.

Hi Simon - Can you give us a bit of background on Emma Bridgewater?

Of course. Although we're technically 'modern' (set up in 1984), Emma Bridgewater is the quintessential British pottery brand. We make around 42,000 pieces of pottery a week and 1.9 million pieces each year, including over 70,000 personalised versions of our iconic half-pint mug.

All our pottery is made in our Stoke-On-Trent factory where we have an incredible team of 230 people, including 50 full-time decorators. In recent years, we've also expanded beyond pottery, adding our distinctive touch to glass, tins, picnicware, stationery, wallpaper and fabrics.

How important is reliable e-commerce delivery to your business?

It doesn't matter if it's our standard range or personalised orders, most of our goods are now sold online (the rest is sold at our factory or by retail partners). As an iconic brand, we also have customers from all over the globe - ranging from collectors to one-off buyers - so it's fair to say that we send lots of shipments.

However, the fragility of our goods makes e-commerce delivery particularly precarious. You can't just throw a mug in a parcel. And given the rigorous hand-checked inspections we do to ensure our pottery is perfect, it's really disappointing when our goods are damaged in transit.

Why did you reach out to Claimit?

Two-fold, really. We first came to Claimit to resolve a host of invoice issues with FedEx (who handle our international shipments). Our logistics team was getting frustrated dealing with the invoice discrepancies manually, so we wanted to automate that.

But when we saw that Claimit also recouped compensation for damaged shipments - a problem that unfortunately we know well - we got in touch.

How was the process of getting up-and-running with Claimit?

Very simple. In less than a week, the Claimit platform was handling all our invoice errors without us needing to do anything bar monitor it.

But the biggest difference was the claims process. Some couriers don't let you claim for damage to pottery items, but we chose two reliable couriers that do: DPD for our domestic and FedEx for our international orders.

But when damage occurs, it's a really cumbersome process to fill in all the details. For DPD, for example, you have to submit a damage report with packaging details and product descriptions within seven working days of the parcel delivery.

Now Claimit makes that super easy and because of the Shopify plug-in, our team can start filing lost and damaged claims in just a couple of clicks.

What difference has Claimit made?

The results have been amazing. I can't put an estimate on the time saved from the manual effort - but it's certainly freed us up to focus on actual logistics issues, not invoice errors.

Our claim success rate is now 80%. That's amazing. We're recouping £10k per month without really having to lift a finger.

And finally. What's your advice for other companies with fragile products that suffer similar problems?

I don't see a reason not to use Claimit. It's simple, successful and recoups compensation that we would have had to bend over backwards to get otherwise.

Claim for damaged shipments with Claimit

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