Mastering Ship-from-Store: Tips from Nudie Jeans, Paul Smith, and Ellis Brigham
Ship-from-Store is having a moment. Find out how Nudie Jeans, Paul Smith, and Ellis Brigham are using it to optimize stock, boost sustainability, and increase sales.
Omnichannel covers a lot of ground in fashion ecommerce, but Ship-from-Store is one strategy delivering standout results for brands on Centra.
Nudie Jeans, Paul Smith, and Ellis Brigham have each shaped Ship-from-Store to fit their business, and the results speak for themselves:
Paul Smith saw over 10% of ecommerce sales come from SFS within the first 4 months of implementing it, with 7,000 peak orders and a record 90%+ full-price sell-through.
Ellis Brigham reduced SFS delivery lead times of up to 10 days to offer customers an express delivery option.
Nudie Jeans has decreased CO2 emissions across their customer and product chain, while also speeding up shipping, simplifying returns, and reducing pick-and-pack costs and return rates.
In this post, we’ll share the key lessons and practical insights from the teams running Ship-from-Store every day.
1. Start with a clear purpose
Ship-from-Store has tons of obvious benefits for brands with a retail footprint, but it’s worth pausing to figure out exactly why you’re doing it before diving in. Are you focused on faster delivery, stock optimization, or sustainability? Having a clear goal will guide decisions on inventory management and allocation, shipping rules, and store operations.
For Nudie Jeans, the objective was clear from day one: cutting down on transportation.
We have very ambitious environmental goals, one being to reduce CO2 emissions throughout the product and customer chain and an important aspect there is shipping. Our online store ships to over 50 countries worldwide and Australia is a really big market for us. So to ship orders from our central warehouse in Gothenburg, Sweden to Australia is obviously not ideal from a sustainability POV.
So we thought, why don’t we ship orders from our 8 stores in Australia? The inventory is already there, so if our stores can handle ecommerce orders, we can minimize transportation and enhance the entire ecommerce experience by decreasing shipping time and simplifying return management.
Customer Experience Manager at Nudie Jeans
2. Train and support in-store staff
Fulfilling online orders in-store relies on retail team members to pick and pack orders efficiently while still prioritizing in-store customers. So brands need to find the balance and educate (or potentially incentivize) teams to ensure full buy-in.
With some training and adjustments, Paul Smith’s team has incorporated Ship-from-Store into their daily in-store routine:
Culturally, fulfilling orders from stores needed some change, but our store staff are used to managing click and collect orders with Ingrid, so it’s not a big issue. That being said, it’s important for them to know that when customers come into the stores, they are priority and sales staff are also commission based, so that will always be their main focus.
Ship-from-Store orders are coming in on a device and we need them to be looking at that device, but not all day on the shop floor, so the balance is in-sight and in-mind. Store managers are bonused, so we do include fulfilling Ship-from-Store orders as part of their takings budget.
Head of Retail Operations at Paul Smith
Ellis Brigham has taken a different approach to compensating staff for fulfilling online orders in-store:
Fulfilling orders from the store means that because it’s working in real time it could be spread throughout the day. We aren’t incentivizing, or using a commission structure, we actually just raised our wage, to stop competition in staff, but it’s part of the job ultimately.
Head of Operations at Ellis Brigham
3. Align store inventory with online demand
Ship-from-Store only works if the items customers want online are actually available in stores. Analyze purchase patterns, identify popular products, as well as common product bundles, and make sure your stores carry the right stock for fulfillment. Otherwise, a handful of items that aren’t typically stocked in-store could cause inefficiencies that cancel out the objective of doing SFS in the first place.
Nudie Jeans experienced this first-hand when some white socks sparked an aha moment:
We as a company decided that we didn't want to do split shipments because we wanted to focus on reducing transportation, so that didn’t make sense.
The fallback is that if a full order is available from the warehouse it will go from there. We had to ensure that store stock suited online customer behaviour. We looked at top selling items to make sure that we had them in-store. Look at purchase patterns and items that are often purchased together because we have five versions of white socks available online but typically only about 2 of those available in-store, as they aren’t a popular in store item. As a result, we wouldn’t be able to use Ship-from-Store for all of those orders just because we didn’t have that stock available.
Customer Experience Manager at Nudie Jeans
4. Pilot SFS before scaling
Before rolling out Ship-from-Store across your entire retail network, it’s a great idea to field-test it in a few stores. Pilots help uncover operational challenges, refine workflows, and give staff time to adapt to new processes.
Paul Smith’s Ship-from-Store journey began with just three stores:
It was based on a small group that were operationally sound, had really high accuracy levels and were quiet enough that they could deliver in a timely manner. Initially it was around shops with the lowest footfall, where they held the majority of the products that online showed, and who was going to be able to fulfil the fastest. The business saw that there was an opportunity, so we are increasing the SFS footprint and are now in 17 stores, and will be in the remaining 3 in the next month.
But not every store is entirely set up—stock rooms are small, so there are some anxieties around staff, peak times, and private sales as we know that SFS is particularly popular during these times. As a result, we might have to change the order of shops to fulfill from in terms of priority, and some you might need to have to switch off at different times, and set rules with Centra as it’s really flexible, so it doesn’t have to be in a set way.
Head of Retail Operations at Paul Smith
5. Leverage technology to make SFS work for your brand
Manually managing Ship-from-Store is near-impossible when you’re dealing with high sales volumes. While workarounds are possible, they are inevitably slow and error-prone.
When Ellis Brigham initially offered Ship-from-Store, the logistical puzzle became apparent:
The way we’ve previously managed Ship-from-Store was that the inventory was going out of our physical stores, back to our distribution center, and then sent out to the customer. And we did it in a really slow way. So for example we have stock in ‘Store A’ that we want to send to the customer, so we send a picking list to that store. And give the store a day to fulfill that stock. If they don’t we go to ‘Store B’ the next day. So we might end up 3-4 days before that store is shipping to the DC and then out to the customer. That’s a lead time of up to 10 days which wasn’t ideal.
Head of Operations at Ellis Brigham
Ship-from-Store should run like a well-oiled machine: letting stores process orders in real time while deciding which location should fulfill each order through optimized inventory management, based on rules and triggers. You need visibility into global stock, the flexibility to set fulfillment rules, and the ability to turn stores on or off and make rapid adjustments whenever needed:
Centra’s OMS is allowing us to do complex order fulfillment whereas up to now we’ve been relying on humans to figure it out. So the functionality of the platforms we’re using are allowing us to develop and investigate complexity and move forward with it.
Head of Operations at Ellis Brigham
Whether your goal is sustainability, faster delivery, or smarter stock use, Nudie Jeans, Paul Smith, and Ellis Brigham show how to turn store inventory into a real advantage.
These insights come from Centra’s panel, ‘Winning at Omnichannel: How Nudie Jeans, Paul Smith, and Ellis Brigham are Pioneering Multi-Channel Commerce,’ hosted by Limesharp CEO, Ed Bull at the Pulse eCommerce Summit 2025—you can listen to the recording here.
