Manchester, London, New York… Burnley – inside Boohoo’s enormous global distribution centre

Manchester, London, New York… Burnley – inside Boohoo’s enormous global distribution centre

The Manchester-based clothing company is now a global fashion giant, shipping to 229 territories

worldwide – and it’s all done out of its colossal distribution centre in Burnley

At the touch of a smartphone app, Boohoo puts a world of fashion at your fingertips ready to be delivered to your

door the next day.

The transaction couldn’t be simpler – but the enormity of the operation behind it is anything but.

The Manchester-based clothing company is now a global fashion giant, shipping to 229 territories worldwide – and

it’s all done out of its colossal distribution centre in Burnley.

Inside the sprawling warehouse are row upon rows of shelves stuffed with thousands of garments and accessories.

Bright pink, blue and red trolleys glide through the aisles, pushed by workers in hi-vis jackets.

Within minutes of completing a purchase online, orders are here ready to be processed. Orders are then grouped

together for pickers to locate and bring to a packing station, where they are packaged up to be dispatched to the

customer.

n the peak period in the run-up to Christmas, there were 2,380 permanent and seasonal staff working in shifts

around the clock, with a further 400 workers manning the customer service department also based on the same

industrial estate. On the busiest day, they processed a whopping 133,000 orders.

Founded by fashion entrepreneurs Carol Kane and Mahmud Kamani in 2006, the brand has become a globally-

recognised name and the business continues to grow, having acquired LA label Nasty Gal and a controlling stake in

PrettyLittleThing, an accessories and clothing brand launched by Mahmud’s son Umar, over the last 12 months. A

standalone website for the BoohooMAN menswear line was also launched in March 2016.

The group turned over nearly £295m for the year ending February 2017, up just over 50 per cent on the previous

year, with a pre-tax profit of almost £31m. Share prices also nearly doubled in that year.

Record Black Friday sales tipped revenue over £491m in the 10 months to December 2017, with a predicted group

revenue growth of around 90 per cent by the end of the current financial year.

The infrastructure must grow too; the company is ploughing millions of pounds into expanding its Burnley premises,

which opened in 2010 with 75 employees. Now the total workforce there stands at 1,415; the company is the town’s

biggest employer.

The first phase of expansion has seen the original warehouse transformed to create new and improved staff facilities,

including a canteen with a pool table, table football and a selfie mirror, as well as an on-site gym and schedule of

fitness classes, which Boohoo says is part of its commitment to its employees’ wellbeing.

Working conditions in the warehouse were scrutinised in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary last year, in which an

undercover reporter claimed pickers could walk up to 20 to 25 miles per day, up and down six flights of stairs.

Boohoo refuted this at the time, putting the average distance at around 7.5 miles. Changes have since been made so

workers operate in smaller zones and this distance is now said to have been halved.

The second stage of expansion has seen three more mezzanine floors built inside the existing warehouse, which has

also expanded into two additional units on site, increasing capacity to more than 1m sq ft in total.

A second, enormous warehouse is also being built across the road, which will double that capacity again. Backing on

to a school playing field with the Lancashire hills in the backdrop, it’s about as unlikely a location as you could

imagine to find a major fashion player.

“We threw the net out within an hour of Manchester and it was the land around the plot that was the deciding

factor,” says Carol.

“It’s hard to predict when you’re a start-up when your sales are going to come, but we were pretty ambitious.

“We’d been working in fashion, Mahmud and I for a very long time. We knew the size of the market and that we were

going to be really tiny to start with.

“Rather than having to move warehouses again and again, we were doing some future-proofing really. Which is not

bad because we’re in year eight here now and we’ve still got a fair bit of expansion ahead of us so I think that was a

really good call, to take a facility we could add to.”

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