Stores Magazine - October 2007 - (Page 58) NUTS AND BOLTS / STORE OPERATIONS Breaking Free of the Herd Alternative Elephant Pharm seeks growth without compromise BY M.V. GREENE orkhorse retail pharmacies are hardly built for glamour; theirs is the yeoman’s work of dispensing medicines and information to customers. But there is an upstart on the landscape seeking to remake that prototype. W Make no mistake, Elephant Pharm will do the heavy lifting of the typical retail pharmacy. But the Berkeley, Calif.based company will also sign you up for yoga classes, provide a wide and inviting array of alternative remedies, books, natural foods, vitamins and supplements and make registered nurses, naturopathic doctors, herbalists and homeopaths available for free consultations. The privately-held company with four Bay Area stores and 250 employees has managed to create quite a buzz with its concept. “We get an incredible amount of calls, letters and e-mails [asking], “‘When are you coming to Manhattan’ or “‘When are you coming to Minneapolis?’” says Tim Millen, vice president of information technology for Elephant Pharm. “Many of these people were on vacation and found us and loved us.” With a rich and varied product line of 35,000 SKUs in each of its stores, Elephant Pharm needed a centralized, realtime system for store inventory management and replenishment. It also needed one that would withstand the company’s long-term plans for growth. “One of the things we wanted to do was to position ourselves for national growth,” Millen says. “Right now, we’re focusing on Bay Area growth, but we wanted to position ourselves [such] that, if opportunities arise, we are not held back by systems.” How Green Is It? Elephant Pharm integrates environmental and social responsibility into the fabric of the stores, providing ongoing programs such as recycling of consumer and company electronic waste, composting classes and instruction on green interior design and green cleaning. 58 STORES / OCTOBER 2007 Elephant Pharm tapped the Atlantabased subsidiary of Aldata Solution, an international provider of supply chain software for retail, wholesale and logistics companies. Using Aldata’s Master Data Management applications, Elephant Pharm was able to channel product into its stores more effectively. “It’s a big SKU count,” Millen says. “We’re such a small company that we didn’t have the manpower to track all those.” Elephant Pharm typically focused on its top-selling and slowest-selling items, “or we might look at a particular vendor and their line of products and see which ones are performing and which ones are not.” Elephant Pharm eschews the cookiecutter approach to retailing: Each store’s merchandise and services are customized to its specific location. Stores are marketed as community hubs and a bridge for customers considering both WWW.STORES.ORG http://WWW.STORES.ORG
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