Enabling Scale: How Fulfil Fuels Ridge's Growth Journey to 9-Figures and Beyond

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Ridge CEO, Sean Frank, talks about his partnership with Fulfil on the Operators Podcast covering topics on Accounting, Omnichannel, Implementation, and more.

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Overview

Few brands can say that their product walks with their customer through the everyday. Ridge is one.

Ridge saw an invitation to reinvent an essential men’s accessory - wallets. It was founded in 2013 by father son duo, Daniel and Paul Kane, and later evolved under the leadership of Sean Frank, its current CEO. Since its inception, Ridge has been making wallets with efficiency and legacy in mind. Core to the wallet’s intentional design, is its RFID blocking function, high-quality materials, and a timeless look and feel. 

This dedication to quality and functional design has opened the doors to years of fast and significant organic growth for Ridge.

With their unmatched potential and a growing demand for their suite of essentials, Ridge needed an ERP that could scale with them and integrate key business processes across the company’s operations.

And that’s where Fulfil comes in.

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Challenge

A Need to Quickly Standardize Operations

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Over the last 5 years, Ridge has seen their business scale fast. In 2020, Ridge grew their Amazon presence from FBA in the US to also include warehouses in Canada and Mexico. Soon after, they expanded their fulfilment footprint to also include the UK, Australia, the EU, with additional markets on the horizon. Ridge scaled to over 100M in revenue in 2022 and is on track to crush this in 2023. With that growth came a doubling of headcount on the Ridge team, and new warehouse nodes through their 3PL network. At the same time, Ridge launched additional product categories – including keys, keycards, rings, pens, and knives – and increased their SKU count by 300%.

Growth like this is never a bad thing. But it certainly presents its challenges.

With the majority of their business operating in spreadsheets, Ridge needed to standardize their quickly-evolving and growing operations. This was a significant endeavour, with specific hurdles to overcome:

1. Fragmented & Outsourced Order Management

‍All fulfilment operations for Ridge were housed in external spreadsheets; there was no centralized database for order routing, creating headaches across operations and hindering their ability to scale with ease.

2. Cumbersome Operations

Ridge had a Shopify to 3PL connection set up, sending all orders to their 3PL and relying on the 3PL network to fulfill them. The trouble was, this setup required back and forth with the 3PL’s technical teams; it required a quoting process for managing orders. By nature, it slowed things down when Ridge was wanting to expand with new nodes and sales channels. ‍‍

3. An Unstructured Purchasing Process

There was no clear way of tracking data affiliated with purchasing for Ridge, from the costing of their products to the status of a supplier shipment. There were lots of spreadsheets attempting to do this, but no standardization as to how they were structured or would need to be structured to scale. This made it difficult to report on purchasing activity.

4. A Complicated Inventory Situation

There was a lot of logic involved for how and where inventory was directed, lining up warehouses to locations in Shopify and ensuring inventory levels were set across multiple listings. The trouble was it was all documented in spreadsheets, requiring manual updates and logic orchestration, which costed the Ridge team tens of hours each week.

5. Setting Team Members up for Success

At the heart of Ridge’s customer service excellence is a well-oiled operations team. As they doubled headcount, Ridge needed to train new team members to adopt their customer-centric values while ensuring new members could apply their expertise in support of the company’s expansion projects. This was hindered by pieced-together processes and antiquated tools.

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Solution

From Spreadsheets to Centralized Control for Growth

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Ridge brought on Fulfil in the fall of 2021. They quickly were able to establish a system for order management and routing, setting up automation rules, and pulling decision-making in-house. As the partnership has matured, Ridge has continued to adopt additional capabilities of Fulfil.

1. Increased Control Over Order Management and Routing Logic

Ridge quickly unlocked Fulfil’s Order Management capabilities, including fulfilment operations, automations, and increased data control and routing across multiple channels such as Shopify, Amazon, and Retail. Suddenly, Ridge had far more control over their order flow, as well as any issues that occurred in their warehouse nodes. Rather than having to wait for permission from a third-party or lean on the technical resources of vendors, they had total control in Fulfil. This helped Ridge fulfil orders for customers faster, as they could route more effectively across multiple nodes, with 86% of orders getting shipped in 1 day or less. It also provided Ridge with a more manageable and scalable data solution, compared to the preceding spreadsheets and manual processes that were used. 

2. Seamless Growth of Fulfillment Centers

Fulfil allowed Ridge to easily spin up and connect new fulfilment nodes, giving them the ability to optimize order routing based on customer proximities. Amongst other factors, this has helped to decrease shipping times and lower the costs they previously had associated with their 3PLs.

3. Infrastructure for Standardization and Reporting

Everything in Fulfil is standardized, for purchasing and beyond. The costing of products, Ridge’s purchasing activity, and generating purchasing reports are all readily available for their team.

4. Saving Labor Costs with Inventory Updates

Ridge was able to reduce manual processes by automating the posting of inventory levels to their Shopify storefront, while improving the accuracy of inventory levels across different listings. And that’s just the start. Ridge continues to roll out and adopt additional feature capabilities in Fulfil, such as Fulfil’s Inventory Planning capabilites, which will enable a more streamlined purchasing process, automate inventory replenishment levels with min-max order points, further reduce data entry, and give easy access to centralized data for their purchasing decisions. Zach Smith, the Director of Operations at Ridge, describes it well when he says, “Everything that's pertinent to our ERP platform, we feel very secure that as soon as we're ready to expand, we can plug everything into Fulfil and go right away.”

5. Easy to Use Software

‍‍Between having an intuitive interface, straightforward documentation, and seamless integrations, Fulfil has been really easy for Ridge to use. This has meant a minimal onboarding period for new team members so they can focus on the task at hand: growth. Smith (Director of Operations), shares more about their team's experience using the Fulfil interface:

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Review/Results

A Strategic Partnership Focused on Expansion and Scale

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Supporting Growth through Effortless Channel Expansion

As Ridge has grown, they have had minimal challenges with matching that increasing scale in Fulfil. Whether it’s adding new sales channels or setting up warehouse nodes, the ERP was built to scale effortlessly, and has seamlessly adapted to a 40% increase in order volumes over the last year alone. 

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A Fast, Straightforward Implementation

When they onboarded with Fulfil in the fall of 2021, Ridge quickly got their ERP stood up and running. Within four weeks, they were live with Fulfil’s native connections to Shopify and their 3PL network, and they had their data and processes loaded into the platform. Smith (Director of Operations), shares more about the experience of implementing Fulfil at Ridge:

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Continuous & Knowledgeable Support Post Implementation

As Zach described, support from Fulfil also goes beyond the implementation period. He and his team have enjoyed using the platform, and are encouraged to get support if and when they need it. Check out what Smith (Director of Operations) has to say on what it's like to engage with the Fulfil Support team:

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An Aligned Technology Partner‍

What’s top of mind for Ridge and its technology partners is finding an alignment of goals for their future state. For Ridge, their primary goal has been finding new ways to grow sales, expand their sales channels, increase their footprint globally, reduce costs, and make their operation more efficient. 

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Looking Ahead

Mastering Wholesale Retail and Auditability

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As Ridge continues to scale, its team envisions what it means to support their customers in the everyday: wallets and beyond. In addition to new product lines featuring thoughtfully-selected, well-crafted products, Ridge’s opportunities are endless.

A major frontier that they are currently exploring is channel expansion via Wholesale Retail. With Fulfil, they easily connect with wholesale partners through its native EDI integration.

Ridge also is honing in on reporting and auditability. With Fulfil, as everything is centralized into one platform as the single source of truth, they can easily provide reports to anyone that wants to look into support transactions for the key metrics of their business.

With aggressive targets for expansion, Fulfil offers Ridge a platform to enable their growth. As they look to the future, they continue to adopt additional capabilities in Fulfil. Zach excitedly states, “Our biggest challenge looking forward is how fast we can go to meet the very ambitious goals that we have in the next few years. Fulfil can absolutely help enable that speed."