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Black Wolf Nation began its men’s skincare line in 2018, going from zero orders to 800 orders per day in just under three years! Once Black Wolf’s volume increased, their current solution, ShipStation, just couldn’t keep up. Their inventory counts were always off, and as their daily order count kept rising, they needed a better warehouse management software solution.
Enter ShipHero. With our powerful warehouse management software, ShipHero was able to provide Black Wolf Nation with the tools it needed to scale up quickly, efficiently manage its shipping operations and grow from not just one business, but two. (More on that later.)
When Alex Lewkowict and his brother Sam co-founded Black Wolf Nation, they started from scratch. It was a brand new company with new products and zero orders going out the door until they made it happen. Starting out with ShipStation, as BlackWolf Nation grew it became apparent to Alex that a more powerful software solution was necessary. Here’s what Black Wolf needed.
By partnering with ShipHero, Black Wolf Nation was immediately able to scale their growth, going from 10,000 orders a month during onboarding to over 25,000 orders a month, in less than a year. “We really needed a better warehouse software solution,” Alex Lewkowict, COO & Founder of Black Wolf Nation, said.
Even though ShipHero comes at a higher price point than ShipStation, Alex soon realized that it would pay for itself immediately. “The rate shopping alone will pay for the software,” he said. “Add in the bulk shipping and kitting functions and it’s so much more ecient and automated.”
Alex also credits one of ShipHero’s superstars, Matt Dickman, with really shepherding him and Black Wolf through the onboarding process. “He almost became a mentor,” Alex said. “Most of what I know about warehousing came from Matt.”
A unique aspect to Alex and Sam’s story is that they grew from one company, a men’s skin care brand to two, starting a 3PL business named ONE23 Fulfillment. Alex credits ShipHero with giving them the ability to even consider starting their own 3PL.
“ShipHero has helped us address all of our challenges, and makes it so easy to run our 3PL business. Adding clients to the system is so easy,” Alex said.
When asked about recommending ShipHero to others, Alex’s answer was an emphatic yes. “Highly recommend,” he said. “Really it’s the difference between little league versus pro,” Alex told us when trying to compare us with his former solution. “We’ve just become much more sophisticated, much more efficient.”
Alex’s path is similar to ShipHero’s CEO & Founder, Aaron Rubin, who also started his own eCommerce brand and then wrote ShipHero’s software and began his own fulfillment company. Two awesome startup brands and 3PL journeys that ShipHero helped scale!
Black Wolf Nation and ONE23 Fulfillment are looking toward the future with ShipHero. “We just launched workflows,” Alex said. “We’re looking to do more personalization, like custom printed gift message cards. We’ve already got a jewelry client that we’re doing custom engraving for.”
ShipHero has been able to grow with Black Wolf Nation and ONE23 Fulfillment, giving both companies the processes and technology they need to scale and automate their operations and find success.
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Good Company was approached by a large dinnerware supplier that needed a 3PL, just a few weeks before Black Friday.
They would be Good Company’s first ever 3PL client and there was no room for error. Good Company needed a solution that could easily integrate with Shopify, and that would scale with them as they were looking to grow quickly. This was just the beginning. Enter ShipHero. With Warehouse Management Software that can serve 3PLs just as well as brands, and a direct integration with Shopify, it was the obvious choice. After the first sales call and then onboarding, it became apparent that ShipHero was the right solution.
“ShipHero checked all the boxes,” said Chad Carlton, the founder of Good Company. “All the fundamentals are there.”
Good Company found that the seamless integration with Shopify was just the beginning of how ShipHero could make their 3PL work better than ever. With an average of six items per order and over 2,000 SKUs, ShipHero’s multi-item batch feature was key to making their warehouse team’s lives easier. “We were able to slash pick times in half,” Carlton said.
“ShipHero for the money, service level and support there is no comparable offering. ShipHero is the multi-tool in our belt.”
Good Company was able to use many of ShipHero’s most helpful features to increase their revenue and build a reputation for good work. “We went from shipping out 500 to 600 units a day to 6,000 to 10,000 units a day. That was all built on the back of ShipHero managing the nuts and bolts of the organization,” Carlton said.
Dynamic slotting and rate shopping proved their value as quickly as multi-item batch and the seamless Shopify integration. With these tools, Good Company was able to build their business without a website or a name. Their outstanding work and service levels were all the promotion they needed.
Because ShipHero is intuitive and easy-to-use, Good Company clients have all they need to help themselves. “The ability to teach new customers how to use the software so they can help themselves is a huge difference maker,” Carlton said. “ShipHero’s client facing transparency and the dashboard that it delivers to clients has been probably the best wow factor when prospecting new customers.”
Chad Carlton believes that the future is bright for Good Company. “The intent is to continue to scale – we will go multi-warehouse – will go to more LTL fulfillment to become more well-rounded … go more omnichannel to contact more traditional brick and mortar retailers …”
“With so much growth on the horizon, it’s important to know that your partners are in it for the long haul. The leadership, the service levels, they all inspire confidence that we needn’t be concerned that ShipHero will no longer grow to satisfy our current and future needs.”
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“Since switching to ShipHero, we’ve reduced our fully-loaded costs by 35%.
At the volumes we move, that’s huge.”
BURST is the affordable, subscription oral care company championed by thousands of dental professionals across the USA. Their product lineup includes their premier sonic toothbrush
CHALLENGES
SOLUTION
RESULTS
Ensuring 3PL software scales with explosive growth
BURST was co-founded by Hamish Khayat and Brittany Stewart in 2017, and in less than a year they had already amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers. It’s no exaggeration to say that this company ‘BURST’ onto the ecommerce scene. By the end of 2019, the company reported 100% year-over-year growth and a 140% increase in ‘BURST Ambassadors.’ These brand advocates, including dentists and hygienists across the country, now number more than 20,000 strong. But as Brittany explains, with meteoric growth comes challenges. Specifically, BURST’s 3PL partners were struggling to fulfill and ship orders at a breakneck pace that matched their growth.
She says, “We’re moving significant volumes—over a hundred thousand packages every single month. We’ve outgrown some 3PLs. The problem with most warehouses boiled down to their software capability—it wasn’t capable of scaling with our growth.”
“Honesty and transparency are so important in a 3PL partner. Issues are going to crop up—I just want to know about them,” Brittany says. “Our retention rate is directly tied to our ability to provide on-time fulfillment and unbelievable customer service. We can’t do that if we don’t know what’s going on.”
BURST finally found the perfect fulfillment partner in Swoop, a Las Vegas-based ecommerce 3PL. And Swoop found the perfect Warehouse Management System (WMS) in ShipHero.
“We have a very close relationship with our fulfillment partner, Swoop. They started looking for a WMS that would help them scale with our growth. We tested out a lot of systems together, and nothing was quite as good as ShipHero” Brittany says.
“The problem with most warehouses boiled down to their software capability—it wasn’t capable of scaling with our growth.”
Painless and intuitive warehouse management system
According to Brandon, owner and CEO of Swoop, ShipHero has “exceeded all expectations.” He says that for a lot of 3PLs “onboarding clients can be quite the task [but] ShipHero has found a way to make it very painless and very quick.”
ShipHero’s software is the perfect fit for ecommerce fulfillment 3PL warehouses looking to scale up. Part of what makes it such an effective solution is its seamless integration with must-have distribution platforms like Amazon.
“We have a Fulfilled By Merchant (FBM) storefront on Amazon. It took us maybe a minute to integrate ShipHero into everything,” Brittany explains.
“Anyone who’s done FBM Amazon fulfillment knows that it can be a pain in the ass without the proper systems in place. With ShipHero, fulfillment is as easy as slapping labels onto packing slips. The integration is perfect and seamless,” she adds.
Getting set up with ShipHero was exceedingly simple. A dedicated solutions engineer visited Swoop’s warehouse to help Brandon and his team with migration, education, training, and rollout. Brandon describes it as a “true partnership” as opposed to just another piece of software you invest in and never wind up using.
After that, using ShipHero within the warehouse is intuitive.
“Through ShipHero, we have the ability to export our orders, get transparency into what’s moving, assess issues, purchase labels, and ship on our accounts. It’s all stuff you need—laid out in a way that’s intuitive and useful for you,” Brittany says.
ShipHero also provides much-needed visibility into the fulfillment process for Brittany’s team. With it, they’re able to maintain the same exceptional, high-level of customer service that first catapulted the BURST brand into the limelight.
We have a team of 30 people responding to customer requests full-time. With ShipHero, they can see what’s going on with an order, make notes, and talk to the warehouse—all through one user-friendly interface,” Brittany says.
ShipHero has even worked with Brittany directly to add options that increase back-end efficiency. For example, instead of needing to pick and weigh each order individually, the ‘bulk shipping’ feature allows warehouse staff to easily pick and ship hundreds of the same product—perfect for a company with limited SKUs.
And if anything ever is confusing, Brittany has an easy-to-navigate knowledge database at her fingertips—help.shiphero.com—and she knows that ShipHero’s team is always standing by to help.
“With ShipHero, fulfillment is as easy as slapping labels onto packing slips. The integration is perfect and seamless.”
Fully-loaded costs cut by 35% or more
BURST continues to have extraordinary retention rates for a subscription-based business, and that’s wholly thanks to their stellar customer service and super-fast turnaround times.
According to Brittany, ShipHero is part of the solution that enables them to continuously deliver that high-quality service.
“We have unbelievable retention rates because we strive to create an incomparable experience for our customers. Robust and user-friendly software makes that possible. A solution like ShipHero pays for itself over and over again,” she says.
With ShipHero, Brittany is confident that her 3PL has a software solution that will enable them to keep pace as BURST expands—which is good, because the company’s growth doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.
“In 2020, we anticipate our growth rate doubling native to the US. Projections indicate that we’ll grow another 60–70% the year after. As for international growth—that’s another beast for another day,” she says.
BURST currently moves well over 100,000 packages each month. Brittany expects that number to double within a year—and that’s before BURST takes its products to an international market.
“To make that growth a reality, ShipHero is vital. We need software that will scale with us as our volumes increase and we expand into multiple locations. The ability to do that without extensively programming lead times (i.e., logic for routing one thing to one place and another thing to another place) is helpful,” she says.
Having compared ShipHero to other solutions firsthand, Brittany’s glad to have finally found a partner that’s both saving her money and as invested in her business’s success as she is.
“Since switching to ShipHero, we’ve reduced our fully-loaded costs by 35%. At the volumes we move, that’s huge,” Brittany says.
“Robust and user-friendly software makes [our high retention rate] possible. A solution like ShipHero pays for itself over and over again.”
“We realized there was no way we’d be able to continue filling orders one year down the road at the rate we were growing. We were excited by the growth, but we needed a software solution like ShipHero.”
American Tall is a direct-toconsumer lifestyle brand for tall (and extra tall) men. They create quality, tailored clothing and accessories for men between 6’3”–7’1” with a Medium to XXL tall build.
CHALLENGES
SOLUTION
RESULTS
Scaling fulfillment with rapid business growth
Finding high-quality, well-tailored men’s clothing online can be a tall order—especially for men who are 6’3” or taller. So there was high demand when American Tall, a men’s apparel brand, launched their direct-to-consumer ecommerce site.
At first, the small family business relished picking and packing each order by hand. They even enclosed personalized thankyou cards with each order. But as their business grew, keeping up with order fulfillment became a challenge.
“It got to the point where we were spending hours writing thank-you cards each night. It also became more and more challenging to pick the orders,” explains Jake Rajsky, Vice President at American Tall.
Manually keeping tabs on what was in stock (with an Excel sheet), what was being ordered, and what was available on the shelf were becoming impossible tasks to manage.
“We’d have items in stock and people were buying them, but there were none on the shelves for our pickers. Our warehouse manager was spending her entire day pulling down skid after skid to replenish the shelves and we couldn’t get ahead of it,” Jake says.
They decided to adopt free batch picking software to ease the workload. But they soon realized that the solution wasn’t scalable with the volume of orders they were receiving.
“The software wasn’t scalable with our business’s growth. It only allowed us to queue up a hundred orders at a time. And there was no way we could do it by hand anymore,” Jake says.
They considered outsourcing shipping to a 3PL, but realized that wasn’t feasible either.
“We couldn’t outsource shipping to a 3PL. We have way too many SKUs—3x or 4x what most retailers have. It would have been impossible for us to pay the crazy-high rates,” Jake says.
With order fulfillment falling further and further behind, American Tall needed a solution that was scalable and affordable. That’s what led them to Shiphero.
“The software wasn’t scalable with our business’s growth. It only allowed us to queue up a hundred orders at a time. And there was no way we could do it by hand anymore.”
ShipHero for fulfillment & shipping
American Tall demoed a number of different warehouse management software solutions, but ShipHero stood out because:
“Out of all the different solutions we trialed and tested, ShipHero was the most intuitive”, Jake says.
Jake began using ShipHero to implement more efficient pick and pack workflows
“Picking and packing works well with ShipHero. It’s way more efficient than we were used to, and it forced us to start thinking bigger”, he explaing.
American Tall used to only have barcodes on cartons, not individual hang tags. Having ShipHero pushed them to request barcodes on individual items, create a detailed map of their warehouse, and add barcodes to each bay location.
With these changes, American Tall started using ShipHero’s Multi-Item Batch, which made it easy to pick multiple orders with different quantities of products into unique tote bags.
“Multi-Item Batch picking and packing was huge. Now, each picker could walk through the warehouse once and get what they needed. I can’t imagine doing it one at a time,” Jake says.
Having a barcode on each product results in fewer mispicks, improved order accuracy, and more satisfied customers.
“Sending out the wrong item is a waste of money and it damages your brand identity. Now, if a picker pulls the wrong item, scanning the barcode gives them an error message. With Multi-Item Batch, everything’s more accurate,” Jake says.
More recently, American Tall has also been using ShipHero to improve inventory management. ShipHero’s support team helped them implement Dynamic Slotting to track how many units of stock they have in each location in their warehouse.
“Before, we might have had 1,000 units of size ‘medium’ somewhere in the warehouse, but we had no way of knowing how many were available to pickers. Maybe only 20 of those were on the shelf and the other 980 were packed away on skids in overstock,” Jake explains.“As of two months ago, we can finally track everything. With Dynamic Slotting, we can see our pick-face—anything up to six feet—and the three rows of racking above are for overstock. It’s very easy to see what’s stored on each skid, pull it down, and transfer it from that location to an active one so our pickers can access it,” he adds.
“Picking and packing works well with ShipHero. It’s way more efficient than we were used to, and it forced us to start thinking bigger.”
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