“Zappos.com: Developing a Supply Chain to Deliver WOW!”

In 1999 Nick Swinmurn, identified the customer’s demand for a new way to buy shoes, something that would differ from their traditional retailer by offering a wider collection of brand, style, color and shoes’ size. The idea that founded of Zappos was then created, an Internet location that would be the solution to the retailers’ limitation of stock and delivery. At the genesis of the company, Swinmurn amassed around 150,000 $ from his friends and family. He then hired Fred Mossler, a senior shoe buyer from Nordstorn. His next step was to persuade Alfred Lin and Tony Hsied, cofounders of Venture Frog a company that was financing Internet Start-ups Companies; they invested $2million in the Zappos concept. Additionally Sequoia capital also helped financing the shoe website project. In the beginning of the company it was very complicated to have brands enlisting in the online distribution of Zappos, as most brand were skeptical about the sales potential of online distribution. In 2000, Hsieh after making personal investment into the company joined Swinmurn as Co-C.E.Os. Lin became CFO in 2005 and in 2006 Swinmurm withdraw from Zappos. The firm kept increasing until 2008 when the sales start plummeting to 1billion of dollars.

Zappos had significant strengths from its supply chain management, Indeed the company has for motto “ be a service company that happens to sale shoes” therefore the company arrogate and accomplished strong values and policies which mature with the firm growth. The way they handled all the metamorphoses of their supply chain was one of their key to success. The way the company did notice the shortage from the drop-ship model and could upgrade it to an In-House inventory so they could have better inventory and customer’s satisfaction, then followed the partnership with UPS which help Zappos to have a better service quality by delivering the shoes in a very short time. Merely the automation