Flight Club — Mollie Wolfe

TL;DR: I designed a suite of internal apps to replace wildly outdated 10 year old technology, solving a number of operations problems. Soon after, Flight Club merged with GOAT to create a powerhouse in the sneaker resale market.

For over a decade, Flight Club (now part of GOAT) has changed the landscape of sneaker retail. Carrying the hottest and hardest to find sneakers from every brand name on the market on both a website and multiple retail stores, it is not just a shoe store, it’s a sneakerhead destination. However, their vintage systems couldn’t keep up with customer demand.

THE PROBLEMs

In-store wait times were 30+ minutes

Flight Club’s legacy system in-store system required 10 or more salespeople to share a single fixed laptop to request shoes from the stockroom for customer try-on. Once shoes were requested, there was no way to track their status, and customers ended up waiting for a long time (especially when the store was busy).

Sneakers + orders were being lost in the warehouse

In the stockroom, requested items were printed on paper tickets. There was no standardized stockroom location schema, and employees were required to have an intimate knowledge of the warehouse’s layout and where particular shoe styles (out of thousands of variations) were located.

Online order fulfillment was backed up 2+ weeks

At the same time, online orders were printed onto paper and picked one by one. This process was slow, and these papers were frequently lost (resulting in further delays for customers). Once items were picked, the actual process of printing shipping labels was complicated and manual, requiring configuration of shipping options including manual address validation. Customer Service didn’t have great visibility on order status throughout this process. Lead times for online order shipments could stretch weeks, especially during busy periods.

The Project

I carefully studied, interviewed, shadowed, and worked alongside employees performing each of these jobs. I researched existing solutions and rapidly tested multiple concepts, and by the end of the project, I had designed a suite of internal apps and updated operations processes that radically improved the company’s capabilities.

The Sales Floor app was a mobile web app I designed that allows scanning barcodes, searching, requesting, and ordering of inventory across all FC locations.

The app was loaded on iPod touches and distributed to each sales floor employee for use on the floor with charging stations behind the register alleviating a huge bottleneck from the legacy system.

Sales staff could request shoes, track the status of the stockroom’s picking activity, and easily provide the shoes to customers. Another great new feature of the system was checking inventory in other locations.

The Warehouse app was a mobile web app used by stockroom employees to retrieve item requested by the sales floor and online orders (replacing the paper printouts of the past)

Item pick requests were automatically sorted by warehouse location and optimized to ensure that stock people could pick several items near each other, further reducing picking times

This updated process greatly sped up order fulfillment time, resulted in fewer customer service issues, and provided much more visibility into the various steps of the order fulfillment process.

The Shipping app was a touchscreen based desktop interface with automated rules which not only reduced the frequency of human error but greatly increased shipping throughput. It also required far less training for new employees.

Results

Operations and retail employees were thrilled with improvements brought about with these new tools.

Online order fulfillment times were reduced from 2+ weeks to less than 24 hours

In store customer wait times were reduced from over 30 minutes to around 5 minutes

MOLLIES ROLE’S

BUSINESS AREAS INVOLVED