Paul Smith's smart, cool clothes and idiosyncratic accessories have earned the firm a place in the front ranks of British fashion as designer and retailer. But as well as pursuing the cutting edge of fashion, the firm is also a keen adopter of new technologies.
Communications technologies are particularly important to the company. For starters, it has operations in 35 countries and showrooms in many of the world's major fashion capitals: London, Paris, Milan, New York and Tokyo. Secondly, suppliers in Italy and China play an important role in supporting the day-to-day efficiency of the business. And thirdly, hundreds of Paul Smith employees regularly travel between the company's offices, factories, warehouses and showrooms.
Because of this, Paul Smith has been keen to pursue a unified communications (UC) strategy, realising its vision in the summer of 2008 when it implemented a dedicated platform, bringing together the various forms of communication the firm uses, including email, instant messaging (IM), Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony, audio conferencing, and videoconferencing.
From a business point of view, it has helped Paul Smith standardise and simplify its office-based and mobile IT equipment. For the large proportion of employees who travel between the international locations, it means they only have to carry one computing device - a laptop with a Bluetooth headset - and can stay in touch with the office through any preferred mode of communication.
Paul Smith has had designs on digital communications for almost a decade, and was an early adopter of VoIP in early 2000. This was, incidentally, the same year that the founder Paul Smith was granted a knighthood. Born in Nottingham in 1946, Smith started as an assistant in a local clothing warehouse at the age of 18. In 1970, he opened his first shop with a few hundred pounds of savings and took evening classes in tailoring, gradually -developing his own distinctive style.
Six years later, in 1976, he had become a consultant to an Italian shirt manufacturer and showed his first collections in Paris under the Paul Smith label. Since then, the company has become a great British success story, establishing a chain of around 225 shops. It now has an annual turnover of over £300m.
Comms is key
<
Registration is free, and gives you full access to our extensive white paper library, case studies & analysis, downloads & speciality areas, and more.
Good technology and strong communications between branches, suppliers and partners have played a vital role in Paul Smith's success, says the firm's head of IT, Lee Bingham. The firm itself has a lean IT team under Bingham's direction with just eight members of staff looking after over 700 users globally, and mainly responsible for network services and support.
"We are an aggressive user of technology and are very technically literate. Where there is a requirement and where we can facilitate business processes, and provide solutions to the business, we will look at using IT," says Bingham.
"The business managers will always be our key sponsors. Ours is a very IT-driven business, and my role is to keep the business fresh and up to date from a technology perspective, and seeing how technology could work within the business model," he explains.
Be the first to comment on this article!