
MeetClareBottle,CEOofoftheUKWarehousingAssociationandVice-ChairofWomeninLogisticsUK
Did you know that the famous red Celebrations tub full of all of our favourite goodies is actually assembled in a warehouse, at the very last minute, not by Mars themselves? We didn’t either, until we chatted with Clare Bottle, CEO of the UK Warehousing Association and Vice-Chair of Women in Logistics UK, who spilled insider intel gathered from 30 years working in warehousing and logistics. These kind of ‘value added’ activities (shipping in bulk and filling, wrapping or amending products in the warehouse) are becoming more and more common across the industry, with knock-on effects for businesses and consumers alike.
Being a trailblazer in her industry, Clare’s insights dig deeper than just insider knowledge on chocolate boxes. She’s worked hard towards achieving gender equality in a notoriously imbalanced sector, regularly champions warehouse workers across the UK, and campaigns for continued collaboration across a traditionally competitive landscape. We were honoured to get the inside scoop on all things retail fulfilment ’25 with Clare, and are delighted to share them in this latest article from Zedify.
1. First of all, I’d love to hear a little about you, Clare – would you mind sharing with us a little about your career, your current roles and what you love about warehousing and logistics as a sector?
Yeah, sure. So I started out in logistics over 30 years ago, in January 94. I can’t really imagine life without it, It’s always been my career. I love the fact that there’s a sort of merging between some of the intellectual problems that you face in logistics – the traveling salesman problem, as they used to call it- about how to do route planning and that kind of thing. You get some really interesting problems to grapple with and you have to come up with practical solutions… and then all the lovely people that you get to work with.
My day job is as CEO of the UK Warehousing Association (UKWA), which is a trade body, and I’ve been doing that for about three and a half years. I always worked in operational logistics before that, so I hadn’t really imagined myself ending up working at a trade body, but I absolutely love it.
2. Could you tell us a bit more about UKWA?
First of all, we talk to the public and the media and the government about why warehousing is important. And I’ll be honest, if we weren’t doing that, nobody else would do it! So it does feel like it’s a very critical part of the mission.
Secondly, we’re all about raising standards. So, for example, there never used to be a recognised qualification for warehouse managers, and we’ve launched the Warehouse Manager CPC about a year ago now, which is globally recognised and accredited, and we’ve had great feedback about that. Thirdly, we build community. So we love to make people feel like they’re part of something valued and important. And fourth and final, it’s a bit more reactive, is that we just help our members. So my vision for the future is that anyone across the UK and Ireland that has a warehousing issue should always first of all think, ‘Oh, UKWA, those are the people that help with this kind of thing’.
3. Could you tell us about 2024 ‘The Year of UK Warehousing’ and your epic journey throughout those 12 months to visit 80 different warehouses?
It was an absolute joy. So our organisation was set up in 1944 which meant it would be 80 years old in 2024, so I thought to myself, well, I might not still be here when UKWA is 100! So I thought, well, I want to make something of 80.
So we brainstormed it as a team, and, well, you know the thing about ‘Around the world in 80 Days’? That was where it originated, this idea that we would go around and see 80 warehouses. And honestly, it couldn’t have gone better. It was such good fun.
It was partly about showcasing what we’re about, because the more that you visit warehouses, the more you can tell their stories. I also wanted to make sure I’d still got the credibility to know what’s going on right now in our members’ organisations.
It was also just about a bit of recognition for people. I met so many frontline people in day-to-day, task-orientated warehouse jobs, where you don’t often get a lot of visits. And it’s not necessarily that it was just me visiting, quite a lot of those visits I had the mayor come with me, or an MP come with me, the government minister Priti Patel, and Baroness Smith of Basildon. And like I said, I want our warehouse workers to feel valued, and that’s part of what it did.
4. What did you find most surprising on your 2024 tour of 80 UK warehouses?
The sheer variety! I’ve been to 80 warehouses. The range of different goods is just mind-blowing. The example I’ll use – I have mentioned to a couple of people before – is one particular warehouse on my tour, a warehouse down in Kent; they store all the batteries for the London buses. They were explaining that there’s a certain sort of fire risk with storage of lithium batteries, and, you know, all the customer service stuff. And then, because it was a 3PL warehouse, we walked to another part of the warehouse and one of their other biggest clients was Agent Provocateur, who do high-end lingerie. And I thought, it sort of doesn’t compute! They explained that they were protecting themselves as a 3PL by having a variety of different customers but, actually, they said, there is a similarity between the two. Even though the type of goods is so different, they’re both really about high-end customer service. It’s got to be spot on. You don’t want to make inventory mistakes. When things are ordered, they’ve got to be accurately dispatched. We’ve got to keep these high standards of storage and make sure the goods don’t get damaged.
5. We we really interested to read about the concept of commoditisation applied to warehousing and 3PLs in your recent report from UKWA- ‘The Warehouse of the Future: Predictions from 2025 to 2050’- could you tell us a bit more about this predicted development and how you think it could affect the services provided by the sector?
So that was actually my first warehouse visit. This was a company called Visku, and they’ve created a concept that they call the Pallet Hotel. It’s based on an idea that came out of Seattle in 2013 so it’s not a brand new concept globally, but it’s had a bit more traction in America and I think this is the first one that there is in the UK. The idea is it’s a bit like hotels.com – you can just go on a website and say, I’ve got so many pallets, I want to store them for such and such an amount of time. Press a few buttons and there you go – you’ve booked it in and that’s the storage sorted!
Now I’m absolutely confident that that could work for some palletised goods when you want some pretty straightforward storage, but I guess what I’m interested to see is, how often is that really what people need, because a lot of what I found when I’ve been touring around is that there’s actually quite a bit of ‘added value activity’ that goes on. With the lingerie that I was talking about, you know, the sort of the picking and packing of that, it’s got to be in a particular type of box, and it’s got to be carefully presented. That added value kind of activity, I think would be much harder to commoditise.
I went to a warehouse at Liverpool Docks where they were importing beanbags and they stopped importing the full beanbags and imported them as empty skins, then filled them at the warehouse, which works much better for global shipping. Same thing for Celebrations chocolates as well! The chocolates just come in brown cardboard boxes, and then the famous red tub that we all have at Christmas, that’s done in a warehouse. So I think those kinds of added value activities are less easy to commoditise in the way that I was describing.
6. I loved this idea of the UK logistics/ 3PL sector as being a foundational industry in a recent post you shared on LinkedIn – kind-of meaning that the sector is the structure on which all other parts of the economy rely and which UK economic growth wouldn’t be possible without.
We’ve obviously seen huge growth in warehousing and logistics which I think in ‘23 was a nearly 20% increase YOY. With that growth, the opportunity to design-in sustainability becomes an even more serious and substantial one. With that in mind, what do you think will help drive that change, that commitment to innovation in sustainability across warehousing, 3PLs and carriers? What kinds of practical changes do you think we’ll see over the next 5,10 years to help improve the impact of the sector?
Well, I should preface my comments by saying I try not to talk too much about freight transport, because there are plenty of other trade bodies out there that specialise in that. But I think, obviously, there’s an interface between freight transport and warehousing. And the worst thing to do from a sustainability point of view is have such a restrictive planning permission system where you end up with warehouses in the wrong place, because then you’re driving up the amount of freight transport that’s required, and that’s always going to have a terrible carbon footprint. We may not be recognised by the government as being a sector that will drive growth in its own right, but we have to be recognised by the government, if they’re going to be successful in delivering that growth through those other sectors.
If I think specifically about your question on sustainability, the biggie which I have been banging the drum about for at least two years is rooftop solar. Only 5% of UK warehouses have any solar panels at all on the roof. And if they do have solar, they normally only have something like a quarter of the roof space covered. It’s still very, very complicated and difficult to get solar panels retrofitted onto a warehouse rooftop. And some of the problems are policy problems that the government needs to fix. So we have been talking to DESNZ, which is the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. And just before the election was announced last year, they were going to publish something about how they were going to make some improvements. And then because the election was called, it couldn’t be published.
And then forklifts! Forklifts always used to be gas powered when I started out, and sometimes diesel. And these days, everybody’s got electric trucks. The electric trucks didn’t used to be very good 20 years ago. But now, there’s been real technical improvements. Rooftop solar goes hand in hand with that, and we’re also seeing more automation. I think only about 15% of warehouses have got robots, but where they have, they’re always electrically powered.
7. At Zedify, we often talk about how we’re ‘over here’ fixing one problem on sustainability-which is emissions in the last mile in cities as ecommerce continues to grow- but that we’re also pretty closely connected to this vast economy from ecommerce which is taking, making and disposing the earth’s resources and the impacts that go along with that. In your report you touch on this slightly, with reference to the shift to a circular economy- what role do you think warehousing and 3PLs have to drive forwards this shift towards repair, rentals and resale?
I think it’s all about stock accuracy. I think the first thing to say is, if we’re going to have second-hand goods going through warehouses and being sold in a similar way to how brand new goods are; if there are any kind of unique blemishes or imperfections, that means every one is a separate SKU. GXO does it for a particular children’s clothes brand – it was one of the 80 that I visited. And they were like, so we’ve got 40 pairs of kids’ dungarees. This one has got a blemish on it. And this one has got a missing button. So every one is a separate SKU. And if you order it on the website, you’ve ordered a particular one. The stock accuracy has to be spot on.
What if the responsibility sat with the supplier and not with the domestic consumer. Then, we have this concept of vendor managed inventory, which I’ve come across before in my logistics career, where in a business to business relationship, you’ve got a silo full of sugar. And it’s my job as the sugar supplier to monitor that with some sensors, and then to make sure you never run out of sugar. That’s how it works at Coca-Cola. But imagine if that was on a domestic basis with, you know, 60 million homes across the UK where the vendor was responsible for that. That’s a stock issue that we’ve not really got our heads around yet.
I’m also really fascinated by Dexory and their technology. Dexory do warehouse robots that drive around your warehouse cross-checking your inventory using cameras to cross-check with your WMS, and then they provide you an exception report. I think they can check a whole 100,000 square foot warehouse in about four hours.
And alongside that, you’ve also just got very, very demanding consumers, especially in the UK, where we’ve got such a high penetration of e-commerce. One way to cater to that is to just hold much, much more stock. But nobody wants to hold much more stock because that’s all your working capital tied up, isn’t it? So I think, again, if we’re going to meet consumers’ demands, we’re going to have to have brilliant stock accuracy.
8. At Zedify, we recognise that we have a long way to go to get gender balance right across our business and, in 2024, we made some first steps towards addressing those issues with a campaign and event aimed at getting more women into our hub and rider teams. We know that many of our managers have started out riding our bikes, so, if we want balance across the business, that’s where we think we need to start. It’s important to recognise that there are barriers outside of our control, such as women being under-represented as cyclists in cities, the wider logistics industry and also in technology. But we see that as a reason to step up and would love to work more widely across the sector to see how we can affect change.
As Vice Chair of Women in Logistics UK, would you be happy to share your thoughts on why better gender balance is important for the sector? And I also wondered if you had any thoughts on the actions you’ve seen from players in the sector that are making a genuine difference?
So, what’s the point of gender diversity? There are probably two simple answers to that. If you’re fishing in a pool for talent and you want to get talented people into your business, don’t fish in a tiny pool, don’t fish in a pool of white, middle-class, middle-aged men.The more you can broaden out the pool you’re fishing in, the more chance you stand of getting talented people.
The other answer is about the risk of groupthink. So I’m going to give an example from Rebel Ideas, which is a book by Matthew Syed. And in Rebel Ideas, he explains that diversity works because you have to be able to think about different things, from the things that you yourself know about.
I would say in any business, if you’ve only got one type of person thinking about the problems that you face, you might miss something major and you definitely won’t have the creativity that you need to solve all your problems.
There’s actually an organization called Everywoman that runs a transport and logistics awards every year. Last year we, UKWA, sponsored one of the awards and we met an amazing lady called Ella who was an apprentice at Unipart and she said, you know, Unipart had done so much to support her through this engineering apprenticeship and she was doing something so male-dominated but she felt really supported and welcomed not just by the management but also by her fellow apprentices who were mainly blokes and I think that’s a cultural thing that’s hard to do but I was really impressed by that, and by her.
For me, I’m able-bodied and heterosexual and white and English is my first language. And, you know, I’m not a poster child for diversity. Just because I’m female, that’s pretty much the only box I tick. But at least it makes me interested in diversity.
Gender is a great place to start. I think when you make things better for women, that’s how you start to make things better for other people that don’t tick all the boxes of the traditional logistics employee.
9. Research shows that when consumers are asked about ethical supply chain practices, they often think about the making of a product itself, rather than the kilometres it travels to reach their doorstep. With your vast experience of warehouse and logistics practices across the UK in mind, how do you think the warehousing and logistics sector could work with suppliers to better translate the importance of ethical transportation along the entire supply chain?
Yeah, I love this question, Harriet. And I can relate it to something that I mentioned in my Warehouse of the Future white paper, about data.
100 years ago, they came up with the wool mark, which was a provenance thing that says, yes, this is actually made out of wool. And more recently, allergens are listed on foodstuffs. And we can tell that these oranges have come from Spain and that kind of thing, but all of that is still quite modern; it’s probably only in the last few decades that that kind of information has even been expected by consumers or demanded by regulation. And so in response to your question – data about provenance should also start to include some information about the supply chain.
Maybe there’s going to be some way that when you buy something, there won’t just be static information about how it was manufactured, but there might be some dynamic information about well you know it came from China but through Turkey and then it was transported on a ship to Rotterdam, and so on.
10. There is a big variety in the models that manufacturers, retailers, fulfilment and logistics companies use to work together. That can mean quite different processes for how goods travel from a to b. With that variety comes complexity and the potential for tension around partnerships, but also opportunities for better outcomes for customer experience, for cost and for environmental impact. With this in mind, how do you think carriers and 3PLs might work more collaboratively in 2025?
One of the key things here is about the sharing of data – I think that’s a really interesting area – but then alongside that the other type of collaboration is about the sharing of ideas.
You may say, I’ve got a different client over here who’s doing a similar thing to you, but they do it much better – come and have a look at this… or have you thought about doing something differently here… and I think in both cases you’ve got to be creative about where you draw the line. Some data is proprietary private data and can’t be shared. If you’re making tanks to send to Ukraine, information sometimes has to be really kept confidential. But then sometimes it’s just kept confidential because people are lazy and don’t think carefully about what could be shared.
If we’re all in logistics, we want to make logistics better and better. And that can be beneficial to everybody.
11. Finally, if you had to pick one specific focus area for warehousing and logistics in 2025 – what would it be and why?
Well, because I get to choose, I’m going to go with the thing that I think is most important, which is building community. So whether it’s through UK Warehousing Association or through Women in Logistics, I just feel like there’s too much division and we ought to make it feel like a really vibrant community where people support each other.
That’s what could and should be. And I think part of the knock-on effect of that is going to be that we’ll have a more powerful voice with the government, and then we’ll get a more favourable regulatory environment.
So, you know, there are some good business reasons why you would do that. But also, you spend so much time at work, it needs to be a fun and collaborative environment, doesn’t it?
Clare Bottle FCILT is CEO of the UK Warehousing Association and Vice-Chair of Women in Logistics UK. Having joined the logistics industry in the 90s she has worked across a number of sectors including chemicals, construction and more recently in food & drink as Associate Director of Warehousing at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. In 2021, she joined the UKWA, a leading trade association with 1,000 members, where she is committed to pursuing economic, social and environmental sustainability.