Chocolate Box.

Claire's Incorporated is an American company with more than 3,000 stores worldwide, seven hundred of which are in Europe. The company came to the UK 3 years ago, when they acquired the fashion accessory business "Bow Bangles."

Since 1997 the number of Claire's stores in the UK has grown from 60 to 300, and over the next two years, the company hopes to increase this to 500. Claire's products are aimed at young females, and include items such as hair accessories and fun jewellery. The company only supplies its own retail outlets and every week their Distribution Centre receives and despatches products to a value of around £3m.

Claire's holds no more than five weeks stock at any one time. When a new product is received, it will be in the stores within 24 hours. When a new store is fitted out it takes only three days to fully stock it. This is a fast moving, and customer focused business.

Claire's UK headquarters is responsible for their European operation and its has recently moved into new premises in Birmingham. Having originally planned to open only 250 stores in five years, the phenomenal growth that the company has achieved means that bigger premises had to be found sooner than anticipated.

The new distribution centre was completed in mid-December 1999 and provides 60,000ý ft of space. Within the warehouse is a storage system having seven double and one single run of Redirack pallet racking. Arranged around a 2920mm aisle the racking runs have fourteen bays and either four or seven beam levels. In total the system provides just over two thousand eight hundred pallet positions. Pallets are handled using reach trucks.

At the far end of the racking system there are two runs of Impex shelving that provide over seven hundred and fifty storage locations for plastic stock boxes. The shelving system has three shelf levels with each level having a load capacity of 50 kilograms. In addition there is a louvered panel shelving system providing another 328 box locations within a secure meshed area.

Our sacrificial leg is fitted throughout the racking system to enable fast repairs of any accidental damage, and rack end barriers protect both ends of each run. In-rack sprinklers complete the installation.

This is the first time that Claire's has used Redirack, but not the first for Nick Sutton the company's Operations Manager. "I used Redirack at my previous company" he explains."Consequently I was keen for them to be chosen as our supplier here. The installation was completed over Christmas, an extremely busy period for Claire's, so we had to rely on Redirack to get on with the job without much input from us. In the event the installation went extremely smoothly, and was completed within the two week deadline". A jewel of an installation!