From Ribbons to Face Masks and Beyond, HairBow Center Celebrates over 7 Years of Growth on Fulfil

Overview

In 2008, Kristi Banwart, with a passion for crafting and entrepreneurship, started selling craft supplies at craft shows. If there were extras leftover after the shows, Kristi would sell her excess supplies on eBay. It didn’t take long before she and her husband, Trent, realized there was a growing market for the supplies themselves, and an opportunity for them to explore.

In 2009, HairBow Center was born. It started small: the Banwarts bought products from US wholesalers, had them shipped to their home, and then would cut them down into smaller packages in their family’s basement to sell them online through a simple website they had built and managed for $7 / month to the at-home crafter.

Before long, Kristi pitched the idea that they should start developing their own product line, to increase the quality of their product offerings and the professionalism of their brand. They found a manufacturer in China and took a leap of faith: ordering $35,000 worth of ribbon and practically maxing out their line of credit.

{{review2-component}}

At this point, the Banwart’s basement was optimized for picking and packing orders, and soon became a daily place of employment for the early HairBow Center team members to fulfill orders. When the semi-trucks started tearing up their residential neighborhood on a regular basis to drop shipments to the Banwarts, they knew they were outgrowing their current operations and built their own HairBow Center warehouse.

By 2010, they had gone from operating out of their basement with one supplier, to bringing on 10 suppliers in China, the US, and Taiwan – plus, they were selling more than just ribbons. Their product mix now included other supplies as well such as elastics, headbands, flowers, and more.

{{demo-component}}

Challenges

The HairBow Center continued to grow and during this time, the Banwarts experimented with building various systems to keep their operations running smoothly. When they were smaller, they could walk around the warehouse with a clipboard and count products to manage inventory. Spreadsheets were used to track everything from purchasing to shipments to finances to inventory. But this only lasted so long.

Growing Pains

Once HairBow hit around 5,000 SKUs, trying to compile their inventory levels and forecast sales across multiple suppliers was a pain-staking and dreaded task. It took days to simply compile the data itself, never mind all the follow-up tasks that awaited it.

{{review3-component}}

On top of that, operations were becoming nearly impossible to complete with critical spreadsheets crashing every day and stalling the fulfilment process. Their newly built warehouse had no specific product locations, and as they continued to grow, it became increasingly difficult to know where a product had been moved, or how to most efficiently pick and pack orders.

False Starts

In 2012, they found a company that promised to resolve it all, they could fix the purchasing problems, systematize warehouse ops, and even migrate their homegrown website over into an integrated online store. It took 6-months of implementation time and significant investment on behalf of HairBow Center, to realize that their new technology partner’s system couldn’t handle HairBow Center’s product weight variations. The entire project was scrapped, leaving HairBow Center for another 3 years with its manual processes and lending to the Banwart’s major apprehension to invest in a technology system. Although Kristi and Trent had countless conversations with ERP vendors, from Netsuite to SAP, they never were able to find a good fit and were starting to fear that no one could help them.

The Solution

In 2015, the Banwarts came across an article by Sharoon Thomas, the CoFounder and CEO at Fulfil. After some initial discovery discussions with Thomas and his team, Fulfil came to visit the Banwarts in Kansas to take a look at their operations, and spent a couple of days diving into their operations and determining how the Fulfil system could help. After considerate deliberation, HairBow Center decided to take the plunge. They knew they couldn’t continue on without a working system much longer and had been impressed with Fulfil’s understanding and knowledgeable staff, and flexible easy to use software technology.

Fulfil was able to streamline HairBow Center’s operations. First, they overhauled inventory, doing away with the incompetent spreadsheets and centralizing inventory from HairBow’s existing channels and setting them up to expand onto others.

{{review4-component}}

Fulfil also set HairBow Center up on a purchasing application that was purpose-built for the needs of HairBow Center. It went beyond setting min and max order points but to actually looking at inventory flows, demand, and helping to forecast what they would need to purchase for future periods.

Warehouse management was also tackled. Fulfil took the old system without product locations and developed a new picking process where staff members could batch pick orders. This reduced the amount of staff traffic traveling from one storey to the next, and also organized order picking based on where products were in the warehouse.

Eventually, HairBow Center also consolidated their shipping system via ShipStation into Fulfil. When a new demand for masks emerged as a result of COVID-19, order volumes for mask-supplies drastically increased. HairBow Center suddenly needed to be able to handle more than their current 1,000 order / day capacity. Fulfil helped HairBow migrate to their shipping module in quick order, to ensure that HairBow Center could fulfil a new queue of 3,000 orders that appeared overnight in the spring of 2020.

{{guide-form-component}}

The Results

HairBow has seen an incredible amount of growth and evolution since it’s humble beginnings in 2009. Since working with Fulfil in 2015, they have continued to successfully grow their business. Since using Fulfil, HairBow Center has seen the following results:

• Increased Accuracy in Inventory: Inventory numbers before Fulfil were constantly rising because they weren’t purchasing the right amounts. Now, with a single view into the entire business, their accuracy in forecasting demand and purchasing the optimal amounts is possible.
  
  
• Sales Growth: With Fulfil’s help, HairBow Center could now publish the correct amount of inventory to all their channels in Fulfil, as well as automatically replenish inventory to ensure stock was available. With these improvements, HairBow Center saw an increase in Amazon channel sales by over 300%.
  
  
• Reduced Time for Purchasing: Managing the purchasing process for thousands of products, which previously took days and weeks to do each quarter, was reduced down to a matter of hours each quarter.
  
  
• Sustainable Headcount: Many scaling merchants end up having to expand headcount exponentially to account for their increasing order volumes, due to inefficient systems. As HairBow Centre continues to grow, their teams are empowered through Fulfil to manage the increase in demand, meaning the company can put hiring spend towards new areas requiring capacity.
  
  
• Product Expansion: From 2019 to 2022, HairBow has seen an increase in their number of SKUs by 57%, without having to sacrifice their operations.
  
  
• Picking and Packing Optimization: Fulfil helps HairBow Center meet their aggressive fulfilment promises to customers by aggregating orders in the warehouse. Automation rules in Fulfil quickly aggregate orders coming in and prioritize based on shipment type and warehouse location. Though the average order includes up to 15 items, many orders simply call for 1-2 items, which can easily be batch picked using Fulfil. This saves at least 45 minutes of labor per day for warehouse staff.
  ‍
• Increased Agility: During COVID-19, HairBow Center saw certain product sales take off, like elastic supplies for face masks. These orders volumes evolved from selling a few units per month to selling ~5,000 units per month. Because Fulfil had set up automation rules to make packing simple orders like this possible, HairBow Center was able to take advantage of this rapid increase in demand.
  ‍
• Technology Consolidation: By using Fulfil, HairBow Center was able to cut out costs on additional technology solutions, consolidating up to 4 different tools overtime, and benefiting from a centralized source of truth to manage their operations.

‍

{{review5-component}}

‍

Looking Ahead

HairBow Center continues to evolve each year, as the industry changes and consumer preferences transform. We asked Trent where he saw the market moving, and he shared insights into a couple of different trends:

“Ultimately, you know, you want your products to be where your customers are, and where they're going to see them,” explains Banwart. “Having that ability to be “multi-channel” - effectively - is really important and we keep evolving that. Luckily with Fulfil’s API, we can easily figure out how to connect our different channels together. Amazon of course is a big one, but also Walmart’s marketplace - we’re seeing a lot of growth there. Just last week another major marketplace reached out as well, which we’re going to explore."

Multi-channel sales, according to Banwart, will continue to be really important to be able to use effectively, especially with more and more big-box retailers exploring the development of their own marketplaces.

Another interesting insight Banwart shares with us: a reminder of the importance of automation.

“We’re seeing more and more that companies need to be able to automate parts of their business,” he explains. “And it’s not every part - I’ve read this before and agree with it - there’s things that humans do best, so let them do that, and there’s things that computers do best, so let the computers do those things. Things like, we used to have an employee who would print off orders, look at them, and group the sheets together based on where things are… well that’s all automated now and the system is able to do that, and make those decisions.”