One year on from the start of a partnership between global beauty behemoth Sephora and logistics firm DHL, Retail Week visits the Coventry warehouse to understand how it is serving one of the nation’s most popular beauty retailers.
Since re-entering the UK market online in late 2022 with a debut store opening in the spring of 2023, Sephora has been on an upward trajectory.
Its spate of nationwide openings has been met with thousands of adoring fans queuing up for hours to get their hands on products from hundreds of brands.
Its ninth UK store opened in Sheffield’s Meadowhall on July 11, with Manchester Arndale, Westgate Oxford, and Cardiff’s St David’s centre due to open later this year.
This growth is being supported by DHL, which is fulfilling orders from its omni-channel distribution centre in Coventry with 150,000 sq ft of floor space dedicated to Sephora’s UK entire supply chain and logistics operation.
To see it all in action, Retail Week took a trip to Coventry to see how the warehouse services Sephora’s plethora of UK customer orders one year on from first opening.
Roaming robots
On first impressions, the warehouse floor isn’t as grand as the likes of Amazon, Ocado, or Walmart, but it still has its fair share of machines aimed at cutting out monotonous, strenuous tasks previously performed by humans.
There are still plenty of people around who pick and pack orders, but autonomous mobile robots, affectionately named after musicians including Madonna and Stormzy, are also put to work.
DHL operations director Rob Bainbridge explained that the robots are configured to understand the layout of the warehouse.
“They are literally driven around on a lead and shown locations, and then that’s replicated across all of them (robots),” he said.
“Then there’s a LiDAR (light detection and ranging) system so the robots know where something is and where to go.”
These robots follow staff around as they pick products for customer orders, where a light will show the colleague where an item should be placed after being scanned.
If an item is placed in the wrong spot or an incorrect item is scanned, the robot will flash red to alert the colleague that it needs to check and correct the problem.
While it’s not clear what the maximum weight these autonomous robots can carry, Bainbridge said each box put on the robots shelves is limited to around ten kilos.
Despite help from robots and other automated machines such as an auto-labeller, staff still have to process around 7,000 Sephora ecommerce orders per day.
“Picking for stores happens overnight, whereas ecommerce picks start from around midday through till 10 o’clock at night,” Bainbridge said.
“The afternoon shift is just crazy – it gets a lot busier.”
More than 600 orders can be packed each hour via automated packing stations, but the DHL team said these machines can be increased to four in peak periods. Staff manually pack larger boxes, with between 30 to 60 orders packed each hour.
Quick to react
Being responsible for an average of 7,000 ecommerce orders a day as well as orders for eight stores is no mean feat, and online orders tend to increase to around 12,000 if a promotion is on.
Not to mention the fact that trends also have a massive impact on customer orders.
DHL Supply Chain managing director of ecommerce and retail Natalie Frow, said as beauty is trend-driven, the team needs to change the warehouse layout quickly.
“We would look at the layout almost on a daily basis. You only need an influencer to (promote) a product that’s sold one a week for the last nine months, then all of a sudden, you’ve got 700 a day going out.
“It really can change that quickly. We have an inventory management team who are working with Sephora, talking to the retailer on a daily basis to understand those trends so we can flow that back in and continue to optimise.”
She added that it has made DHL design more “agile, flexible” operations to keep the cost base and service demands down.
“Our slotting tool within our IT systems also monitors demand data to highlight to the inventory team the change in stock keeping units (SKUs).
“The amount of data that is important in running these day-to-day operations has massively changed over the last five years, as well as having the skills to be able to work in that environment.”
The warehouse operates on a 24-hour basis, and Sephora even kept its next-day delivery service over Black Friday – amounting in huge pressure for staff to get a mass of orders out on time.
The DHL Supply Chain team hopes to replicate that success over peak this year, with the company recently announcing a £550m investment to expand its infrastructure and speed up automation roll out across its operations in the UK and Ireland.
Its Coventry warehouse will be home to Estée Lauder in February 2026, with DHL offering the exact same solution it does currently with Sephora.
As investments grow and more beauty retailers turn to DHL for supply chain and logistics, Bainbridge said he expects the team will be the beauty specialist by this time next year.
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