To say this company imports and exports clothing is to sell short its impact on the fashion world – indeed, our culture – by creating and managing some of the most well-known apparel brands in the United States. It’s not only luxury label shoppers that will recognize their handiwork; their brands are household names from California to Connecticut. Yet, the average man on the street would not know their name, and that’s just the way they like it.

 

Challenge

This global wholesale organization is largely insulated from the margin pressures of the retail clothing business and leverages an omni-channel distribution strategy, including brick-and-mortar, e-commerce and m-commerce, working with the best available channels as capricious consumer behavior dictates. Still it must work toward efficiencies in its own organization – from inventory to wholesale sales – to continue to meet shareholder expectations. One way is through investments in technology.

 

Objective

As part of this investment, the company needed to upgrade the network connections at its U.S. locations. These included not only upscale corporate sales offices and state-of-the-art data centers but also warehouses and import centers housed in aging facilities at airports and shipyards in major U.S. ports in states like California, Florida and New York.

 

Solution

APX Net, a carrier-agnostic communications service provider specializing in complex, multilocation high-speed data networks, designed a solution to address these objectives.

APX Net proposed and deployed dedicated Internet access – 20Mbps to 1Gbps – to the company’s numerous locations around the country. Among these, APX Net had to pull new fiber into the landmark Empire State Building in New York City.

This was a unique deployment in other ways as well. APX Net had to satisfy rigorous requirements of the U.S. Customs & Border Protection Department to connect to federally restricted import/export facilities the company manages in various seaports and airports.

“Even APX Net’s field techs had to obtain government security clearances to enter and work inside the buildings to install equipment and services,” said Jeff Wood, president of sales for APX Net, noting the level of scrutiny his company had to withstand to deliver the client’s network.

APX Net had to satisfy rigorous requirements of the U.S. Customs & Border Protection Department to connect to federally restricted import/export facilities the company manages in various seaports and airports.

APX Net also provides gigabit point-to-point links between the wholesaler’s data centers and disaster recovery (DR) centers. And, APX Net proactively manages Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing at corporate headquarters to intelligently reroute traffic around problematic areas and ensure uninterrupted connectivity.

 

Results

The international powerhouse has remained a customer of APX Net for more than five years. APX Net attributes this loyalty to its willingness to go the extra mile – literally – in providing network not only to disparate but atypical locations.

Uniquely, APX Net consolidates billing for all U.S. locations, making cost accounting and allocation simpler for the multinational company.

“Our billing has an exceptional degree of accuracy, which is unheard of in telecom,” said Wood. “We work hard to get it right – not just with billing, but with everything we do for our clients. That’s why an organization as large as this one relies on APX Net for its complex network projects.”

“We work hard to get it right – not just with billing but with everything we do for our clients. That’s why an organization as large as this one relies on APX Net for it complex network projects,” said Jeff Wood, Vice President of Sales, APX Net.