Multi-brand strategies are an attractive option for all types of companies in nearly every industry – but especially for eCommerce businesses.
By diversifying your product portfolio, you can quickly reach new audiences, use the data and insights to grow all your brands and cross-sell to different customers. There’s more to explore, which we’ll cover below.
What’s more, the right software – especially in the shipping and fulfilment stage – can make the execution of a multi-brand strategy really quite easy.
That’s what you’ll learn in this article: What a multi-brand strategy is, the benefits and how you can use powerful software to automate the difficult parts and get your orders out to customers.
A multi-brand strategy means having a catalog of products under different brands and names, which are all owned by one business. While you may not have heard the term before, multi-brand companies are everywhere:
There’s not just one way of setting up a multi-brand strategy, however. Allow us to introduce the “Branded house” and “House of brands” concept.
The most popular approach, a branded house strategy keeps all sub-brands housed on one eCommerce platform/store. It’s the best approach if you want to launch new brands that serve the same audience. Think Jordan shoes being sold on the Nike website.
A house of brands is the opposite approach. A house of brands means different brands owned by the same company, but operated independently of one another. They often have different target audiences and completely individual identities – for example Meta operating WhatsApp. In this situation, each brand would typically have its own eCommerce store/platform too.
Regardless of how a business presents these different brands to customers, shipping is a common challenge. Thankfully, shipping software can make it easy (more on this later).
There’s a reason some of the largest companies in the world have deployed multi-brand strategies:
Behind the scenes, you’re probably wondering how you manage all these different brands and ship orders out to customers. With an automated shipping and fulfilment platform, it’s easy.
Starshipit was built to handle multi-brand and multi-location shipping, and setup is as easy as a few clicks. Using Starshipit also means you’re able to automate every other part of your shipping process, which can save you hours per week.
If you dispatch from multiple locations, have multiple brands or use various integrations (like two Shopify stores) you can set up child accounts for each additional location or brand.
There are a few different ways you can use Starshipit for your multi-brand strategy:
You'd use a multi-location account when you want to ship from multiple locations and want to bill shipping costs to different courier accounts.
You can assign orders to multi-location child accounts manually or by using a rule. When you fulfil the order on the child account, Starshipit will write-back the tracking number through the parent account's integration.
If you dispatch multiple brands from the same warehouse, you can use your main parent account to create child accounts for each brand or business. Each child account will have its own manifest settings and customised branded notifications.
In this scenario you’d have two or more printers set up at different workstations. Each workstation has its own login. All settings are inherited from the parent account, other than the printer settings.
Starshipit can easily sit at the centre of your multi-brand strategy, but it can also automate other parts of your shipping process and reduce the time spent dealing with shipping labels, correcting invalid addresses and more.
Here’s why retailers and eCommerce businesses choose Starshipit:
Interested in seeing how Starshipit can help you to save time and money on every order? Try out platform for free for 30 days (no credit card required) or book a demo with one of our helpful team members.
You can also check out more of our case studies to see how other retailers have used Starshipit for their own multi-brand strategies. Now, they’re growing faster and delivering better experiences for their customers.
Or, read how to manage multi-location and multi-brand shipping in our support guide.
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