Powering Moss Bros: how Fetchify helped ensure delivery accuracy for one of the UK’s best-known menswear retailers

Since 1851, Moss Bros has been a familiar face on the UK’s high streets, and over the 170-plus years that have followed, it’s become the name that is synonymous with menswear.

Today, the business offers menswear for sale and hire across the UK via storefront and website, online in Ireland and US, and via retail partners across much of the rest of the world.

“We’re actually better known for our hire business – I think everybody knows this is the place to go and hire a tux or hire a suit for a wedding,” says Matthew Henton, Moss Bros’ Head of e-Commerce.

“However, we are predominantly a retail business. Most guys don’t buy suits and formal wear all that often, and when they do, they want that in-store experience of checking their size and fit.”

The accuracy required for ecommerce

Over more recent years, Moss Bros’ growth has come from the more casual product range offered online – with less formal attire easier to buy online, ecommerce now makes up a sizeable chunk of business.

For online transactions, getting the goods to the customer accurately and quickly is an incredibly important part of the process, as it is for formal wear purchases and hires.

Being able to enter address details quickly and accurately online is essential to delivering a good customer experience – while capturing delivery details precisely can ultimately end up making or breaking a big occasion.

“Originally, on our ecommerce site, we had a postcode lookup service from one of the traditional providers, which required users to put in their postcode, press the button and wait for the results to come back,” says Henton.

“It wasn’t really a particularly slick way of supporting customers entering their addresses, and a lot of the customers would just skip it and type their address in full, so it was a friction point for customers.”

“It also led to us having quite a lot of incorrect addresses, which obviously flows through to your logistics operation and undeliverable parcels and so on.”

Teaming up with Fetchify

After assessing the different options on the market, the Moss Bros team decided to trust Fetchify’s Address Auto-Complete solution – which has proved to be a positive decision.

“We immediately saw that it ticked all the boxes that we were looking for,” Henton explains. “The user experience was really simple and intuitive, it had the ability for UK, Ireland and US address lookups, and it was just quite clearly going to be very easy to implement.

“Our developers took no more than 10 minutes to read through the documentation and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll have that up and running in no time’. So it became a very easy decision for us to go ahead and start working with Fetchify.”

Another aspect of Fetchify that’s helped improve the online experience for customers relates to hire transactions – which may have multiple addresses associated with one transaction.

“With hire, particularly weddings, you may have one billing address, another delivery address, which may be the venue, and then you may have a different address where you want us to come and collect those garments from after your wedding. “It’s really important in that scenario that we get the address correct, and we are able to deliver the product to where it needs to be for an event as important as a wedding. That is what we can’t afford to get wrong.”

“People are less likely to put their own address in incorrectly, but when it’s the address of a venue that you’re not necessarily quite as familiar with, then they may make a mistake. It’s incredibly important in that scenario to get that address correct, to ensure we deliver the product where it needs to be.”

And the impact of Fetchify’s Address Auto-Complete on that aspect of the business has been significant.

“We’ve had an improvement in our deliverability rates, and have fewer ‘cannot deliver’ packages back from our courier partners,” says Henton.

All of which has meant an increase in satisfied customers, big days going to plan, and the reputation of one of the UK’s longest-established menswear retailers firmly intact.