Dubarry Limited

3 . eBusiness Project

Dubarry set up its first web site (www.dubarry.ie) five years ago. The strategy was fairly straightforward – provide the product catalogue directly online.

“It was a non-interactive site. It was there for reference for consumers and for the trade but if it was there for consumers, it was just to tell them about the products. It didn’t tell them where they could buy them or how much they were. But at the time, as web sites went, it was nice, looked well and it gave us a presence there.”

That first web site did generate a lot of traffic and enquiries so Dubarry began to incorporate the web address onto various advertising and promotional materials. It also discovered that the most common enquiries were in relation to product availability and care as well as requests for sponsorship.

As the environment began to shift and eBusiness became in vogue, the company set about exploring how else it could exploit the online medium.

3.1 Motivation

At the time there was a very strong push towards eBusiness and while the outside influences were important, Dubarry was initially interested in how eBusiness could work on the business-to-business side.
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“We found ourselves in the situation that the administrative side of handling eighteen markets had significant resource implications. A lot of it paper based. People faxing orders through; people phoning to see if the order was received; people wanting to know when goods would arrive. We saw eBusiness as an opportunity to provide a facility where we could eliminate some of this administrative burden. This was two fold because it was not just the administrative time we were spending; it was also the administrative time our distributors were spending. What we wanted to do was to focus on trying to eliminate out as much of the administrative process and get them to spend more time on selling and business development.

3.2 Planning

The first step, according to Walsh, was to thoroughly research the market.

“We were followers not leaders so we set about seeing what else was out there. We spent about six to nine months visiting web sites; Proctor and Gamble, Coca-Cola – you name it. We looked at everything including all our competitors, obvious people like Clarkes, Ecco, Timberland. But then we realised footwear wasn’t going to be at the cutting edge of this and we expanded it out to find out how people generally were using eBusiness,” explains Walsh. Dubarry also took a very close look at its own business and how it is segmented. It literally sketched a matrix, which looked at the business both geographically and in product areas.

“We scoped everything but the emphasis really was on the marine and outdoor ranges. The way we developed the site however, allows us to develop it further. We need to take all these different product categories and geographic regions into account. Not just the Irish market, the UK market and the Rest of the World where we had representation. But the areas where we didn’t have representation – they were particularly important,” says Walsh.

From all of this background research, the company identified three very clear strategies – a business to business aimed at its international distributors; a business to consumer element aimed at consumers in areas where it didn’t have market representation and a more general aim to promote and assist in the marketing of the brand whether to consumer or trade. It was important to “upgrade” to a .dotcom address and www.DubarryofIreland.com replaced www.Dubarry.ie. The new site was launched in November 2001.

Overall, Walsh believes that the basic research carried out at the start of the project is what makes the difference in the successful implementation of an eBusiness strategy. “For anybody about to start the process, the work that we did initially, the soul searching about understanding our own business, it’s crucial to do that. We found that diagrammatically listing that out in terms of flow charts was very helpful. We did flow charts for everything – say the woman in the UK looking for comfort shoes or yachtsman in Argentina. We asked ourselves how they might navigate through the site. Looking back I think all of that was what set us on the right road.”

The company then set about getting feedback both from distributors and customers. The consumer market – in particular the sailing market – proved most receptive.

“One of the areas in which we’re quite lucky is that sailors tend to be very technically orientated. We found that at major boat shows -- the people were technically very switched on because they were used to dealing with a lot of technical equipment on their boats. So that was a great advantage to us because we’re preaching to a converted audience,” explains Walsh.

However feedback from distributors was initially less positive, as Walsh explains.

“When we started to talk to our distributors at the Distributors Conference in May 2000 and we began to float this idea of moving into eBusiness, we got a lot of very strong resistance. Their distributors were concerned that Dubarry would sell across their territories and hence were very resistant. In order to reassure their distributors they took a policy decision not to sell into markets where the had an existing presence. If, for example, somebody in France logged onto the web site to search for a specific style that the french distributor carried, the web site would direct them to the ‘Locate a Dealer’ page. If, on the other hand, the distributor did not carry the style in question, the customer would be directed to the ‘Buy Online’ page. To enable this to happen, from a technical view point, rules were built into the web site. There rules reference the list of styles each country’s distributor carry, and display the appropriate web page. These lists are updated periodically, to reflect any changes.

3.3 Funding

One of the issues for many companies considering embarking on an eBusiness project is deciding on timing. According to Walsh, since the Dubarry site was never intended as a purely sales medium, the payback period was significantly longer.

“The site didn’t have that short period of cost justification. It’s like one of the many situations you face in business -- do we change the logo or do we change the exhibition stand. They’re easy decisions to postpone because they’re not critical. In this scenario we said this is an area of activity that we have to be involved in. In the footwear technology sense we lead the market, so we needed to be seen to lead in other technology areas but it didn’t have the instant payback and it was one of those decisions that in a mediocre financial year it would be easy to postpone,” he explains.

While there was some cost savings to be made on streamlining the administrative system for distributors, the plan was to redirect these resources into other areas – customer support and marketing for example. As the company was mulling over the timing and funding issue it heard that funds were available from Enterprise Ireland for eBusiness projects.

“When we knew the funds were available, it was the difference between doing a watered down version of what we knew we needed and going the full hog. Once we became aware that funds were available, it concentrated our minds in taking the project forward.”