Table of Contents
** Minutes
Building a premium brand with premium fulfillment
Customizing packaging to level up the customer experience
Viewing all of your must-have data in one dashboard
Minimizing shipping costs through strategic inventory placement
Leveraging lot control capabilities to maintain inventory freshness
Streamlining returns for products with expiration dates
Scaling to 9 figures with one fulfillment partner
Congratulations to Bloom on Receiving $90M in Equity Funding!
True to its name, Bloom Nutrition keeps on growing. The brand recently raised $90M in an equity funding round led by Nutrabolt, positioning the omnichannel brand to continue to scale their operations and help thousands of women on their fitness journeys.
Learn how health and wellness brand Bloom Nutrition used ShipBob to support fulfillment as they scaled into a global, omnichannel, and wildly successful business.
Customer Profile
Bloom Nutrition is a health and wellness brand dedicated to helping everyone bloom into their best selves. From protein powders to superfood blends, collagen boosters to vitamins, each of Bloom’s supplements is packed with high-quality ingredients that are both nutritious and delicious. With thousands of 5-star reviews and a subscription program, Bloom makes it easy and affordable to fuel your fitness journey.
Key metrics
- 9 figures in sales in 2023
- 4 ShipBob fulfillment centers
- 1.5M+ orders shipped with ShipBob
- Shipping to over 70 countries
- 3-person operations team
- 3 big-box retail partners
About Bloom Nutrition
In 2018, Mari Llewellyn was ready for a change.
Having hit her lowest point both mentally and physically, she knew it was time to start taking her health seriously. With the help of her trainer, future husband, and future co-founder Greg LaVecchia, the entrepreneur began a fitness journey that would change her life forever. Before long, Mari fell in love with fitness – she finally felt happy, her mental health improved, and she even lost over 90 pounds.
There was only one problem: no matter how hard they looked, Mari and Greg couldn’t find supplements that complemented Mari’s health journey. All the supplements designed for women that they tried included unpronouncable ingredients, had little natural nutritional value, and tasted terrible.
So, they did what any enterprising power couple would do: they made their own.
The pair founded Bloom Nutrition with the goal of supporting other women on their wellness journeys through delicious supplements made from high-quality ingredients. Since then, Bloom has experienced enormous success – even going viral on TikTok – and has scaled into a hundred-million-dollar, multichannel business that serves women all over the world.
We sat down with Neil Blewitt, SVP of Operations at Bloom Nutrition, to discuss how Bloom scaled, leveraging ShipBob’s fulfillment solution to support 9 figures in sales.
Building a premium brand with premium fulfillment
As told to ShipBob by Neil Blewitt, SVP of Operations at Bloom Nutrition.
From the very beginning, our founders positioned Bloom as a more premium brand. When you do that, you need to be prepared to give your customers a more fine-tuned and customized experience – and that starts with the receiving and unboxing experience, which meant Bloom needed to nail fulfillment early.
ShipBob has been able to provide the high-quality fulfillment that is expected by premium brands. They definitely gave us the logistics technology to run our business, the requisite ever-expanding capacity and coverage we require, and great service. I’ve worked with a lot of different fulfillment partners in the past, and this is by far some of the most reliable service I’ve seen.
Having quality fulfillment has only gotten more important as we’ve scaled. ShipBob is a sophisticated fulfillment solution, so they’re not intimidated by rapid growth. Not only do they know how to support massive order volumes, but they also know how to reduce fulfillment costs while doing it – a real win-win.
“As you get larger, customer expectations increase – and as expectations increase, so does the importance of quality and service. So we weren’t just looking for the lowest cost-provider, but a partner that could also give our customers a really good experience that’s consistent with the high standards to which we hold our brand holds. That’s what’s going help a business scale in the long run, and that’s what ShipBob provides us.”
Neil Blewitt, SVP of Operations at Bloom Nutrition
Customizing packaging to level up the customer experience
When we first started out, our packaging process was really simple – we just picked the product, stuck it in a brown box, and shipped it. Because ShipBob can support custom packaging, we’ve leveled up our strategy to include Bloom-branded boxes, marketing inserts, and the ability for customers to add personalized gift notes to their orders.
The level of customization that ShipBob supports helps us reinforce our image as a premium-quality product, and lets us curate a branded experience at scale for customers as soon as their package arrives on their doorstep.
“Having the ability to customize and offer premium unboxing experiences for customers is a fairly unique offering, and oftentimes it’s difficult to find partners who can do it at all – let alone at the scale Bloom operates at. So ShipBob letting us use our own packaging for hundreds of thousands of DTC orders is a pretty rare feature that we don’t take for granted.”
Neil Blewitt, SVP of Operations at Bloom Nutrition
Viewing all of your must-have data in one dashboard
As you grow your business, nice-to-haves quickly becomes must-haves – especially when it comes to data and reporting. There are certain data points that you just have to know, like where we should store our inventory to be closer to our customers, what you’re charging customers for shipping, and what your average order values are. These sorts of metrics need to be driving your decisions if you’re going to be profitable, and so you need to know that information inside out.
ShipBob’s dashboard provides us deep visibility into those crucial metrics for inventory, fulfillment, and shipping. It has been phenomenal. With the real-time data we see in our ShipBob dashboard, we can glean insights that tell us which levers to pull and what our costs are across channels, so that we don’t get any surprises on our monthly income statements. Those insights and the reporting that ShipBob offers are definitely a must-have for our business.
Minimizing shipping costs through strategic inventory placement
We’re using ShipBob’s Inventory Placement Program to manage inventory allocation and distribution, and it’s been super helpful for us. We send our inventory to one hub location, and from there, ShipBob determines the most strategic split of inventory across its fulfillment center network and distributes our inventory for us.
“We’re fulfilling orders from 4 ShipBob fulfillment centers on the West Coast, Southwest, Midwest, and Northeast. By storing inventory and fulfilling orders from 4 different regions, we’ve been able to engineer it so that most of our shipments are within Zones 1 and 2. Eliminating high shipping zone ranges by distributing inventory is a no-brainer, and really helps us minimize our shipping costs, especially on high-velocity items.”
Neil Blewitt, SVP of Operations at Bloom Nutrition
Having the ability to reduce shipping costs through distributed inventory is probably the difference between profitability and unprofitability for most businesses in the DTC space – so the fact that ShipBob’s network enables brands to do it so easily is a huge differentiator.
Leveraging lot control capabilities to maintain inventory freshness
Many of our products have expiration dates, so it’s incredibly important for us to track and maintain inventory freshness – and ShipBob’s lot control features make that really easy.
When we send new inventory to ShipBob, all we have to do is mark it as a lot product in the ShipBob dashboard and list the lot number and expiration date for each lot on the warehouse receiving order (WRO). From there, ShipBob handles receiving and stores each lot separately for trackability and so there’s no confusion when it’s time to pick.
We use the FEFO (First Expired, First Out) method of inventory management, meaning that we want to prioritize picking inventory units that have the earliest expiration date. Thankfully, ShipBob’s default logic is designed to always ship items with the nearest listed expiration date first, so that works out perfectly. At our scale, it would be impossible to manually check the expiration date of every single unit we ship, so leveraging ShipBob’s lot capabilities gives us much more peace of mind.
Streamlining returns for products with expiration dates
ShipBob also makes it easy to handle return to sender (RTS) orders for lot products.
Through the ShipBob dashboard, we can set up our preferences for each SKU that indicate exactly how we want ShipBob to handle a return – whether we want the item quarantined or disposed of – and ShipBob will automatically follow those rules so we don’t have to manage every customer-initiated return ourselves.
If a lot product is RTS, we can have it restocked. In that scenario, ShipBob’s team inspects each product to ensure it’s unopened and undamaged, and reviews the lot number and expiration date to check it matches the information we have in our dashboard.
They even upload a photo of the returned item’s lot information, so we can always double-check and confirm that everything’s correct.
We can also configure each SKU’s minimum shelf life in regard to returns so that if a product gets returned and its expiration date is a certain number of days out, it won’t get restocked. It saves us so much trouble, and keeps us from restocking and shipping out products that shouldn’t go out.
Scaling to 9 figures with one fulfillment partner
When we first partnered with ShipBob, we were fairly small. We had only been in business for a year, were doing less than a million dollars in revenue, and only had a few employees. We couldn’t have imagined that we would get this big – or that our first fulfillment provider would be able to scale with us all the way!
The reality is, when you do what Bloom’s done and scale to millions of orders in just a few years, you outgrow many of your partners. There’s nothing wrong with that – it’s just really uncommon to find a fulfillment provider that can keep meeting your needs as you grow exponentially.
But that’s the niche that ShipBob has created. ShipBob is the rare fulfillment partner that’s built out the services and capabilities successful brands will eventually need, so that as they grow and want to branch out into new geographies, channels, and capabilities, they don’t have to change fulfillment providers.
Five or ten years ago, that would have probably been unthinkable – you would have had to fulfill orders out of your garage until you could find somebody in your town who had a 10,000 square foot warehouse that would fill your stuff, and then you have them bursting at seams.
Now, ShipBob offers scaling brands an all-in-one partnership, so we can run our business with just 3 people on our operations team. It’s a really unique offering, and I think Bloom is very lucky and fortunate to have found ShipBob early on.
Looking to the future
The natural evolution for Bloom is certainly to broaden the retail side of the business. We already have hugely successful partnerships with Amazon and Target, and we’ll probably look to add 3-5 more substantial retailer partnerships over the next 12-15 months.
We’re also investing in our global presence! We just launched DTC in Mexico, and we’re certainly looking at expanding into a handful of other countries like Canada, the UK, and Australia, where ShipBob has local fulfillment centers. Bloom may even expand into the EU, or into the Far East or South America. Since Bloom’s mission and our ability to communicate and interact with customers very much transcends borders, there’s really no limit on where we could grow!
Now that we’ve reached the scale we’re at today, we have the resources and partnerships to make bolder growth moves.
For example, we’re at a point where we could turn on TikTok Shop in just a week or two – and with ShipBob powering Fulfillment by TikTok, it would be really easy to do!
Having ShipBob as our fulfillment partner has helped us reach this level of success as a brand quickly – and now that we have, we get to bring Bloom to a lot more people, and continue creating new ways to support millions of women in their fitness journeys.
Bloom Nutrition’s team at ShipBob
Mark Anders
Mark is the Sr. Merchant Success Manager at ShipBob who supports Bloom.
Shipton Bogle
Shipton is the Sr. Enterprise Account Executive who helped Bloom get started with ShipBob.
Casey Armstrong
Casey is the CMO of ShipBob, and serves as the Executive Sponsor for Bloom.
Get started with ShipBob
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