Purchasing, Inventory Management, Warehouse Management
Stone Edge Order Manager, ShipRush, ShipStation
Home Goods, Arts & Craft Supplies
March, Back-to-School, December
US, Canada, Europe, Australia, Mexico, Brazil
1
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.
"I had calculated that it was going to take us 12 or 13 years to sell all that ribbon at our current rate of sales, but, it was a leap of faith and it turned out to be the right move. We actually had to reorder our ribbon within 4, 5, 6 months - something like that - we had to order more."
- Trent Banwart, CEO of HairBow Center
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.
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.
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.
"It took us days and weeks to do our purchasing tasks which, in Fulfil, take a matter of hours."
- Trent Banwart, CEO of HairBow Center
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.
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.
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.
"We were also selling on Amazon and eBay at the time, and we were wanting to expand to other channels, but we didn't have a good system to integrate inventory and that was blocking us. So that was one of the first processes - getting everything centralized coming into one system - and Fulfil allowed us to do that."
- Trent Banwart, CEO of HairBow Center
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.
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:
“Since moving onto Fulfil for shipping, we’ve seen a 169% increase in orders shipped out, while only having had to add a 12% Labor increase.”
- Trent Banwart
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.”
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