Growing Revenue While Decreasing Inventory on Hand With Made by Mary & Fulfil

Personalization at scale is a challenging operational puzzle which has little room for error and requires careful planning in order to be able to successfully execute. 

This is compounded by the fact that the Made by Mary team not only personalizes their jewelry through engraving and embossing, but also tracks the raw materials of their finished goods products through multiple sub-assembly steps.

As Made by Mary continued to grow, it became evident that a more robust system would need to be put in place in order to help them continue to offer their customers the experience they had come to expect. However, implementing an ERP is never an easy choice and the team went through a careful evaluation process to determine the right system for their needs.

“We heard horror stories - you’re going to spend at least 200k in first year cost plus a full time systems admin. There are a couple of brands that we know that have lost so much money transitioning to a traditional ERP like NetSuite.” Taylor Moody, CEO 

More specifically, there were 3 main challenges that the team were looking to solve:

1. Managing Complex SKUs
2. Tracking Production
3. Inventory Visibility

No 1 - Managing Complex SKUs

Prior to working with Fulfil, Made by Mary had the impossible task of trying to track inventory for a series of complex, nested, interchangeable raw material SKUs that were used in the final finished goods products. This is to track common items such as charms or letters that are used in multiple different assembled products. They did not have Bills of Materials (BOMs), and inventory and production processes were tracked manually in spreadsheets, or using Shopify, which was never completely accurate.

To make matters worse, the lack of BOMs led to SKU proliferation with 100s of additional SKUs being created to track WIP goods. This then made it difficult to analyze sales information, with data being inaccurately aggregated across multiple products.

No 2 - Tracking Production

When a large percentage of orders are personalized, it becomes imperative to have an effective system in place to track production orders through the warehouse. However, the Made by Mary team struggled to use ShipStation to accomplish the large volume of personalization that was required to keep up with their growth. They did not have a way to track individual workstations, productivity, damaged goods, or personnel, and inventory accuracy was continually a problem.

This led to frequent situations where orders were personalized incorrectly, mis-shipments, or an order being missed entirely, with no visibility until the customer reached out to complain. They also struggled to effectively prioritize orders, sometimes with over 5,000 orders in the queue to be personalized.

No 3 - Inventory Bloat

With a foundation of complex SKU structure, and an added layer of production chaos, tracking inventory accurately was an impossible task. Shopify, QuickBooks, spreadsheets, and ShipStation were all being used independently to track different areas of the business, but without a solid integration between the platforms. This meant that there wasn’t a single source of truth that could be relied upon for accurate inventory information.

To mitigate this, the Made by Mary team simply had to carry a higher volume of inventory at any given time, to account for the lack of inventory accuracy and to prevent stockouts. On average, they would have about 9 months worth of inventory on hand at any given time.

No 1 - SKU Structure Overhaul

Fulfil and the Made by Mary team started by doing a complete overhaul of the SKU structure to include both raw materials and finished goods through the use of BOMs. This resulted in a large reduction in the number of SKUs to track, which made life much easier for the purchasing, inventory management, and accounting teams.

Additionally, the leadership team at Made by Mary now has real time visibility into the data they need in order to run their business - whether that’s sales velocities, inventory on hand, or re-ordering lead times.

“Now we have 100% visibility into our raw materials, which is huge and we’re doing consistent cycle counts to track inventory.” Taylor Moody, CEO

No 2 - Using the Production App

Rebuilding the SKU structure enabled the implementation of Fulfil’s Production App, which has support for tracking raw materials, WIP inventory, batching, forecasting, and much more.

Batching in particular has unlocked a new level of productivity and efficiency for the Made by Mary production team. Not only can the team group a series of orders together that share similar characteristics from a production point of view, but they can also automatically prioritize based on data such as the planned ship data to getthe most time-sensitive orders out the door first.

Finally, the trickle down effects of having an accurate SKU structure, with a system in place to track inventory throughout the production process, means that inventory is dramatically more accurate at any given time.

No 3 - Lean Inventory

Without accurate inventory, an eCommerce brand is forced to have more inventory on hand to prevent selling out, or being unable to fulfill an order that is placed.

After putting in place a system that can accurately track inventory, and more importantly a system that they can trust, they were able to reduce inventory on hand from 9 months to 4 months. More impressively, this is all while growing sales by 7% YoY. Higher sales, with less inventory on hand, means greater profitability. Additionally, this inventory accuracy gave them the confidence to explore additional sales channels. Since onboarding with Fulfil they were able to launch EDI with Nordstrom and are actively exploring Amazon as well.

“We were able to reduce inventory on hand by over 50%, while growing sales 7% YoY.” Taylor Moody, CEO