“I know it is the right thing to do. I wish I’d done it sooner,” laments Steve Rawlins, CEO at Anglia. The ‘it’ is a customer loyalty scheme branded Anglia Plus that is targeting 65,000 potential customers in Europe as well as being open to the 3,500 to 5,000 customers with which Anglia typically trades.
While this can be seen as a response to some of Anglia’s suppliers asking why the company doesn’t operate in Europe, Rawlins also sees the initiative as giving a lifeline to customers in Europe who need a next day delivery and can’t hang about waiting for product from further afield with a longer delivery time.
All have been credit checked and now have accounts with Anglia. Benefits from the loyalty card scheme include free next day delivery into Europe, and extended payment terms to 90 days. Most notably, customers can receive rewards depending on spend.
“No other distributor can offer next day delivery from the UK into Europe,” claims Rawlins.
He hopes to put pressure on the major US distributors that import product into Europe usually in a two-day delivery timeframe.
Citing customers writing to Anglia about green policies, Rawlins points out that “Anglia will be flying across the Channel, not the Atlantic.” All product will be delivered in recyclable boxes with a special non-plastic tape and any customers with a penchant for organic honey will be delighted to see bee hives in the company’s grounds.
Anglia launched Anglia Plus on 1st April.
To dismiss any scepticism on behalf of customers, Rawlins reassured them: “This is definitely not an April Fools prank!
“Launching on April 1st, we wanted to give customers something to smile about. We wanted to offer our loyal customers something of real, tangible benefit to them. We believe this scheme to be unique in the industry and is an example of how Anglia is trying to help customers during this challenging period. While other companies talk about service, we deliver.”
Social media marketing will emphasise Anglia’s experience in the distribution market, citing its 54 years in business, consistent appearances in reports on the European distribution sector, and its position in the top 40 global component distributors.
And Anglia Live, the company’s online store, launched in 2012 and gets thousands of hits daily, both from UK and European customers. Virtually all of Anglia’s 140 suppliers are supporting the initiative. “We have enough suppliers on the line card to cover new business but we need more,” says Rawlins. “We have had approaches from other suppliers.”
In the coming months Anglia will place prominent adverts in the European electronics media to attract new suppliers. The message will be “if you want a distributor that can deliver next day into Europe free of charge, call Steve Rawlins”.
“We have already picked up a deal from a company that saw the initial announcement. They recognise we do something other distributors can’t or don’t want to do.”
Three reward levels are offered in the customer loyalty scheme:
1. Silver – spend £5,000 in the qualifying period to earn £500
2. Gold – spend £10,000 to earn £1,000
3. Platinum – spend £25,000 to earn a maximum £2,500
Customers receive a credit note which they can spend to buy more components. The loyalty scheme rewards start to accrue from April this year to July 2026. Existing customers of Anglia Live will automatically be enrolled in Anglia Plus.
Customers will be able to access the Anglia Plus website to see exactly where they are on each band. Work started on the scheme in September last year. Mailing lists have been constructed and been an eye opener for Rawlins.
“We were surprised there were so many electronic manufacturing service (EMS) companies we didn’t know,” remarks Rawlins. “We identified 2,000 EMS customers in Europe, and we only knew 200 of them. They could love this service, they need small quantities rapidly.”
He believes Anglia gets 20-25% of an EMS company’s total business in the UK and will look to replicate that in Europe.
It has been an intense effort, and there have been plenty of hurdles to jump. Not least, the paperwork required post-Brexit to import goods from the UK into Europe. “It’s so complicated,” sighs Rawlins. “It took us ages to get the systems in place to handle it.”
Rawlins has had to establish a separate company, owned by Anglia, in the French capital to accept deliveries.
To get the product into Europe for next day delivery, Anglia has renegotiated a deal with its preferred courier.
“We have had I don’t know how many meetings with FedEx. The deal is basically jam tomorrow. If volumes start to pick up we’ve agreed we won’t start to kick them for a better price,” says Rawlins.
The courier has agreed new pick up times from Anglia’s Wisbech, Cambridgeshire headquarters to ensure orders are at Stansted Airport by 7pm for transit to Paris.
From there FedEx will ensure next day delivery to most parts of Europe, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Iberia. “Further out into eastern Europe may be two days,” says Rawlins.
He estimates this represents a £1 million investment by Anglia.
“I look at our payroll and think why have we got 15 software engineers, that’s 10% of Anglia. Thank God we have them, it enables us to do things that distributors our size can only dream about. Exporting into Europe is time consuming, lots of paperwork, lots of audits, we have had to change some internal procedures, including a second shift in the warehouse as well as creating new shipping areas and new holding areas – to attack 65,000 customers in one go you need slick logistics,” remarks Rawlins.
“It has been a lot of work,” he continues. “We’ve undertaken some trial orders with existing customers, it’s been a really smooth process. We have plenty of inventory in the warehouse. The products for export are kept in clearly quarantined area to avoid any mix ups.”
In addition, a separate four-strong team headed by Claire Joyce, Sales Director for Anglia Europe and China regions will work closely with OEM customers in the UK and Europe who are controlling the product design but will be using an offshore manufacturing partner to build the product. After the initial design support, they will help them create a simple and sustainable logistics solution leveraging inventory held at Anglia’s distribution centre in the UK and at its logistics hub in Asia (Hong Kong).
“We have had a lot of success with this model, it allows OEM customers to enjoy a high level of consistent support no matter where the product may end up being built, it differs to competitors models where they manage the OEM and EMS separately via different regional offices which can cause a disconnect,” Rawlins comments.
He is already looking ahead. Some of his suppliers have suggested an Anglia office presence in Europe, mentioning both Munich and Milan as possible venues.
Rawlins will undertake a review of Anglia Plus in six months’ time, and is not ruling anything out, even a move into other bigger territories.
“If I can get 20K new customers buying online regularly, it [would] be like a dog with two tails,” says Rawlins.
This article originally appeared in the May/June issue of Procurement Pro.
