‍Grunt Style is passionate about providing a quality product and exceptional experience to their customers, and they do this at scale. But back-track a few years and you learn that it wasn’t always easy to deliver this way.‍

This modern DTC brand learned the hard way that a fragmented fulfillment stack can be one of the biggest challenges to scale. Over the last 6 years, Grunt Style has doubled their employee headcount and moved from operating out of a small, single location in Illinois (which did everything from production to fulfillment to administration), to having three locations across the US with specialized facilities. In order to manage this growth and continue to deliver on a delighting customer experience, they sought out business and software systems that could handle their evolution. From attempting multiple enterprise implementations, to dealing with issue-prone middleware, soliciting external consultants to support open-source platforms, and piecing together disjointed software, Grunt Style struggled to create a business system that fit. And that’s why they needed Fulfil.

Since 2019, while Grunt Style’s priorities have remained the same, their execution has looked a lot different, thanks to Fulfil. In July of 2019, Grunt Style signed a statement of work and two months later, they were live on a new ERP system that added significant efficiencies to their existing workflows and set them up for future growth. 

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Challenges & Solution

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There were three major pain points the Grunt Style team was looking to resolve through their ERP solution.

‍NO. 1 - Grunt Style was Lacking a Single Source of Truth for Inventory Management

Inventory management ties very tightly to customer experience and maintaining smooth operational procedures. Grunt Style was using multiple software systems (including high reliance on Google Sheets) to manage their inventory but struggling with ensuring order availability, communicating updates to customers, and matching demand.

‍The Fulfil Solution

Fulfil allowed the entire Grunt Style team to get on top of their inventory management by centralizing supply in their IMS system. This has enabled Grunt Style to:

• Easily view an accurate supply of inventory as well as optimize how it’s organized (e.g. from bucket to bin level) 
• Manage their backlog and warehouse logistics
• Increasing usability and access of data across the entire team
• With better visibility has come the ability to predict upcoming needs and even inform more confident future purchasing decisions

"Fulfil didn’t just equip us with software, it’s wrapped around both our software and business processes. We’ve grown so much alongside Fulfil since, it’s hard to picture our operations without Fulfil."

Aubrey Day

Senior Business Analyst at Grunt Style 

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NO. 2 - Grunt Style had Outgrown their Existing Tech Stack and Weren’t Well Served by the “Next Level” Options

Their existing software applications couldn’t scale with the level of growth Grunt Style was experiencing. They had a lot of middleware that would break on them. When trying to resolve these pain points by “biting the bullet” on larger, more robust implementations like through Salesforce or SAP, they found a minimal amount of customization and slow-moving process made for a bad fit with their company’s agile characteristics.

‍The Fulfil Solution

Fulfil met the Grunt Style team where they were, with an ERP built specifically for modern DTC brands, just like them. This equipped Grunt Style with an ERP that could:

• Centralize and consolidate many of their existing business systems and software products
• Become their Production, Inventory Planning, and WMS, as well as offer other modules around demand planning and finance
• Start simple and be implemented quickly, but grow in complexity overtime with the business 
• Streamline omnichannel order management with native integrations to Amazon, eBay, Shopify and Shopify POS

‍“I have never worked with so many people that are so professional and driven and willing to help! We can ask you to weigh in on almost anything and it feels like our success is really important to you guys. Everybody that I’ve worked with, whether it’s implementation team or support, the attitude and drive and helpfulness is really refreshing! We really value you guys and appreciate all the ideas you bring to the table.” 

Aubrey Day

Senior Business Analyst at Grunt Style‍

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NO. 3 - Grunt Style was Struggling to Quickly Fulfill Orders on Time and Maintain Customer Happiness

Customers increasingly expect a two-day turnaround on orders due to the “Amazon Effect” and Grunt Style is no exception to this standard that has been set for eCommerce. Layer on external factors like supply chain issues and the ability to delight customers with quick and accurate deliveries becomes a major challenge.

The Fulfil Solution

Fulfil powers Grunt Style’s ability to communicate openly and accurately with their customers. Even when handling demand surges at 5x their standard order volumes, Grunt Style can still manage transparent and organized operations through Fulfil’s capabilities to: 

• Maintain accurate inventory information through a single source of truth 
• Bring order and optimization to warehouse logistics with organized inventory, and making sure staff know where to go, when, and how to do it most efficiently
• Keep the Grunt Style crew operating together as an aligned team, with warehouse and customer service closely connected to the status of each order, shipment, and customer 

‍“The most important thing to the customer is transparency. If you’re out of something, let them know! If you can’t fulfill on time, let them know. They just want to know. The ability to reach out and communicate that with customers is important. For me, to do that it comes back to being able to manage and understand my backlog and my orders, and I do that through Fulfil."

Will Andrews

Director of Fulfillment at Grunt Style

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What's Next

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Since 2019 and their initial implementation, Grunt Style has continued to evolve their use of the Fulfil platform as they have ramped up order volumes and adapted to constant business change. Their partnership with Fulfil is set up to adapt together as they easily expand on the complexity of their implemented solution:  

• Additional platform integrations have been developed for new carriers like Pitney Bowes, to diversify carriers and remain competitive. Innovative new features released by Fulfil, such as Rate Shopping, have supplied built-in competitive advantage for Grunt Style.
   
• Grunt Style built out custom reporting for business decision making with Fulfil’s Open API, which displays extremely granular visibility into their fulfillment metrics, and enables faster decisions.
  
  
• Grunt Style has witnessed first hand how having adaptive, agile technology like Fulfil can increase their resilience and efficiency in responding to the chaos of the fulfillment world: such as supply chain issues, labour shortages, natural disasters, and even the standard seasonal fluctuations around holidays and BFCM events. Ultimately, they have become better at responding and also capable of proactively anticipating change.

‍“Since using Fulfil I’ve been able to spend more time looking up and out, first thinking about weeks down the road, and now, eventually that turned into 12 months down the road now. I’m able to spend time looking forward rather than putting out the fires of today."

Dave Benson

Director of Operations at Grunt Style

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Review

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Fulfil has enabled Grunt Style to grow and adapt in an increasingly competitive and shifting environment. Fulfil’s modern ERP built for eCommerce brands was the perfect fit for Grunt Style to help them deliver on their transparency-based customer experience, and Fulfil proved to be the perfect partner to support Grunt Style’s continuous success and evolution.