How Fulfil enabled Lynch Creek Farm to 4X production without increasing costs

Overview

Lynch Creek Farm is owned and operated by Andy and Tracy Hunter. Andy’s love for agriculture, gardening, and sustainability was instilled in him at an early age, growing up on their family farm on Lynch Road in Shelton, Washington. Originally, the farm had been used at a small scale by the Hunter family to keep Andy and his siblings occupied, and to grow food for their family. 

Within a few years however, the Hunter’s hobby farm had evolved into a full-time livelihood. In 1982, the Hunters were selling their organic produce to the broader community at multiple regional farmer’s markets, including the largest one in the state, Olympia Farmers Market.

Andy continued the farming tradition into adulthood, and together with his wife, Tracy, expanded the family business and farming operation to include specialty seasonal items. This includes fresh-cut flowers in the summer months and evergreen wreaths over the winter holiday season. 

Lynch Creek Farm’s evergreen wreaths, in particular, have taken the nation by storm. These handcrafted, natural wreaths quickly became an iconic product for the family’s business and have led to an exciting growth story for the Hunters as they developed another branch of their business: eCommerce.

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Challenge

In 2006, Andy and Tracy started producing and selling wreaths online. However, crafting fresh evergreen wreaths from scratch wasn’t exactly the simplest operation to establish.

Lynch Creek Farm wreaths are handmade and created using the highest quality materials including a variety of freshly sourced evergreen boughs and decorative pinecones and berries. Each one is produced by an artist at the farm and completed with a custom-made bow. This level of quality requires in-house assembly and warehouse facilities, as well as year-round production of their bows in preparation to meet the seasonal demand. 

The seasonality of Lynch Creek Farm’s business operations is intense, with their iconic festive product line only being sold during two months of the year in November and December. The team experiences a massive surge in sales orders during this time-period, and their operations must be able to handle the sudden influx of demand.

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Lynch Creek Farm worked hard to operationalize the business, building strong processes and systems to produce their wreaths at scale. However, as the business has grown, it has faced new operational challenges. By 2017, their existing solution - largely built using spreadsheets, alongside a point solution for shipping called ShipStation - was starting to wither.

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Production bottlenecks

Each year, Lynch Creek Farms sells hundreds of thousands of wreaths within a 6-8 week window. At that scale, thousands of packages must be shipped quickly and efficiently each day. However, with outdated processes and inefficient operations, production and fulfillment capacity was maxed at producing and shipping 5,000 items per day.

Each production workstation was heavily dependent on the next to keep fulfillment moving. If the labelling team members got held up sorting, it would impact the output that fulfillment was able to ship, and so on.

Guesswork

Estimating the number of orders that were going to be produced each day or the variety of orders was incredibly manual and often inaccurate. 

The team was stuck with systems that limited their ability to proactively plan daily operations, and in many cases, they were working backwards to estimate demand any given day. 

Director of Operations, Eve Munguia, recalls one example where they would use the number of shipping labels that were generated each day to understand how many orders they had to fulfil. Their shipping labels - large, 8.5” x 11” pieces of paper - would be compiled into folders by SKU, stored in a tote, and then individually weighed at a table. A basic formula using the weight of the shipping labels would dictate the number of orders that had to ship for the day.

There was no way of knowing how many orders were actually coming in each day.

Internal knowledge

The team also noticed that a lot of critical information on how things worked or where things were in the facility was not accessible. Instead, an individual on the team would hold this special knowledge and be required to share it to unblock their colleagues.

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Solution

As Lynch Creek Farm has grown, the window to accomplish their fulfillment goals and meet demand has stayed consistent. With a 6-8 week period allocated to generate the bulk of their annual sales, the team knew that they needed a platform they could trust to offer more operational power as they scaled.

The team found the perfect technology partnership in Fulfil. Moving their operations onto the Fulfil solution helped their team become increasingly efficient, and empowered each department to grow in their capabilities. The impacts were felt across a wide range of their operations, including production, order management, and inventory management.

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With their business being so seasonal, Lynch Creek Farms knew they would need a solution with some flexibility. Fulfil was able to offer an off-the-shelf solution, including a robust, native integration with Shopify, but also a platform that could be tweaked along the way to make it work for Lynch Creek Farm’s unique demand cycle.

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Review/Results

Since using Fulfil, Lynch Creek Farm has seen important growth and scale, enhanced their operations, as well as improved customer experience and employee satisfaction.

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Greater Production Capacity‍

Fulfil’s systemization of production unlocked massive efficiency gains for Lynch Creek Farms.

Stable Headcount Growth

The labor market has become increasingly competitive in recent years, driving a national labor shortage that Lynch Creek Farms is no stranger to. As they grow, the ability to maintain a stable headcount, and strengthen the capabilities and capacity of their existing team members through Fulfil has been a useful and cost-effective alternative to bringing on more staff.

Improved Employee Satisfaction

Team members are able to focus on their jobs more easily using Fulfil, with quick access to information and efficient systems, driving success for the company and compensation benefits.

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Increased Customer Satisfaction

By using Fulfil, Lynch Creek Farm has been able to meet the demands of their customers much more effectively: they’ve been able to fulfil more orders and get shipments out quickly and on-time. As a result, they keep their customers happy.

Better Accuracy in Anticipating Costs

With the global supply chain issues that have slowed fulfillment capabilities since 2020, Lynch Creek Farm has also experienced the frustrations that can arise from the loss of control and not knowing when supplier shipments will arrive, as well as the increased shipping rates that have plagued the industry. Using Fulfil, they’ve been able to better anticipate costs and plan the appropriate next steps, as rates are tracked in the platform.

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Transparency in Customer Service

Fulfil has given Lynch Creek Farms’ Customer Service team the ability to provide transparent responses to their customers and reassure them of the status of their orders.

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Unlocking Additional Capabilities

The team at Lynch Creek Farms has taken advantage of Fulfil’s 100% Open API, to build a simplified production app on top of the ERP platform.

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Greater Visibility into Operations

Fulfil provided the team with enhanced insight into their operations, minimizing the challenges associated with exclusive knowledge and ensuring that everyone had access to information as needed.

Accurate & Predictive Purchasing

Fulfil allowed Lynch Creek Farm to make production plans in advance of their busy season using historical data, and then it automatically adjusts plans each week based on what is in their pipeline to date and the rate of sales orders.

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Looking ahead

A culture of flexibility and change has always been something deeply valued by the leadership and operations teams at Lynch Creek Farm. Inspired by the principles of lean manufacturing, they’re always looking for ways to be fluid, modify existing processes, and continually improve.

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Knowing he’s anticipating change, we asked Eve what’s on the horizon for Lynch Creek Farm and their operations.

Leveraging your team

Lynch Creek Farm puts great emphasis on the quality of their team and their involvement throughout the entire fulfilment process. They are always looking for new ways to improve their day-to-day, and intend to continue to leverage the expertise of their team members on the front-line to optimize their operations.

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Custom & self-serve orders

One growing sales channel for Lynch Creek Farm is Corporate orders, for companies who purchase hundreds of wreaths at a time for their staff. Today, processing Corporate orders requires the Customer Service team at Lynch Creek Farm to manually fetch spreadsheets with differently formatted data and enter orders manually - something that won’t scale. 

Through the 100% Open API at Fulfil, Lynch Creek Farm is developing a self-serve order system for Corporate customers to enter bulk orders on their own, complete with custom gift messages. This is a win-win: not only can the customer get an order processed much faster, but Lynch Creek Farm also saves extensive labor costs to hire what might have been upwards of 25+ agents to serve this new channel.