Table of Contents
** Minutes
Managing fulfillment for a viral cookware brand with a 2-person operations team
Leveraging intelligence in the warehouse to meet customer expectations at scale
Expanding to four warehouses with ease
Saving $1.5M in freight costs while cutting fulfillment speed in half
Driving $500,000 per day in additional holiday revenue while delivering before Christmas
Streamlining DTC & B2B fulfilment through a single partner
Achieving line item visibility for more transparent billing
Enabling custom packaging and pristine unboxings
Learn how modern kitchenware and cookware brand Our Place leverages ShipBob’s fulfillment solutions to drive cost savings while optimizing the customer experience.
Customer Profile
Founded in 2019, Our Place is a modern kitchenware and cookware company on a mission to make cooking and sharing a meal an easier, more joyful experience. Beginning with the viral Always Pan — a sleek yet versatile pan that does the jobs of 10 traditional cookware pieces — Our Place has innovated appliances, tools, and tableware to streamline kitchens while bringing people together. The brand serves millions of customers across the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia, making good on its goal to build a bigger table with room for all.
Key metrics
- 6 ShipBob fulfillment centers in the US, Canada, and Australia
- $1.5M saved in outbound freight costs by distributing inventory across ShipBob’s network
- >1.2 million parcels expected to ship in 2024
- 0.5 days to fulfill an order
- 2.5 days to transfer an order from the warehouse to customer’s door
- 98% of domestic US parcels avoid highest-cost zones
About Our Place
As an immigrant settled in California, Shiza Shahid wanted to reconnect with a sense of home.
Inspired by the nourishing foods she had grown up with, she started learning to cook, and soon discovered a new passion. The entrepreneur saw the joy that came from home cooking and gathering around a table for a meal – but also wondered if there was a better way to do it.
After realizing that no kitchenware brand made products for modern, multicultural cooks, Shiza and her partner, Amir Tehrani, set out to create their own. The pair founded Our Place to invent appliances that celebrated unique cooking traditions while making cooking easier, beginning with their flagship product: the Always Pan.
The Always Pan quickly became a viral sensation, and Our Place has been growing ever since. The brand has expanded its product line, retail presence, and global market, and continues to delight customers across the world with new and innovative tools to help people connect through cooking.
We sat down with Ali Shahid, the COO of Our Place, to discuss how the brand leverages ShipBob’s fulfillment technology and global fulfillment network to streamline operations, maximize cost-savings, and deliver unforgettable customer experiences.
Managing fulfillment for a viral cookware brand with a 2-person operations team
As told to ShipBob by Ali Shahid, COO of Our Place.
We sought a fulfillment partner primarily for their exceptional operational capabilities. Our priority was finding a partner capable of efficiently handling large-scale fulfillment while also streamlining our workflows. ShipBob emerged as the perfect fit, meeting our needs beyond expectation.
Our Operations team operates with remarkable efficiency, often assigning a single talented individual to manage all workflows within an entire function. A prime illustration is our fulfillment department, where one individual oversees end-to-end operations across seven warehouses.
This level of accountability for a mid-market brand is made possible by ShipBob’s technology and extensive network, which handles a significant portion of the operational workload. Consequently, we can direct our attention towards managing exceptions within workflows instead of the workflow itself.
In conventional fulfillment settings, a sizable team is typically required to orchestrate the shipment of goods from numerous warehouses. However, with ShipBob, their platform provides insights into the performance of each network warehouse on any given day. I can easily access metrics such as the number of parcels shipped, average transit times, bundling efficiency, and the average cost per parcel from a specific warehouse—all slacked directly to me daily.
“ShipBob has transformed our operations into a key competitive edge. I doubt any of our competitors can match our ability to receive orders and deliver them within two and a half days at average. With ShipBob, misshipments are rare occurrences, enabling us to consistently deliver on our promises to customers, ensuring they receive exactly what they’ve ordered.”
Ali Shahid, COO of Our Place
Leveraging intelligence in the warehouse to meet customer expectations at scale
Another essential criterion for selecting a fulfillment partner was their superior technical proficiency. For us, technical prowess holds equal significance to operational excellence. Comparing ShipBob’s platform to other fulfillment providers, it’s challenging to find a match for its extensive technical capabilities. ShipBob’s architecture is exceptionally robust, underpinning a comprehensive technology stack that seamlessly scales to accommodate businesses transitioning from small to mid-market and beyond.
“The technology employed by ShipBob guarantees accurate deliveries to our customers. ShipBob’s warehouse management system is equipped with numerous checks and balances, minimizing the possibility of incorrect items being shipped by warehouse associates.“
Ali Shahid, COO of Our Place
When comparing ShipBob’s technical capabilities to those of many other fulfillment competitors, it’s crucial to investigate further to grasp the underdeveloped state of the technology infrastructure at several larger, well-known fulfillment companies. Some of these companies are just now beginning to construct a technical framework capable of accommodating the scalability of their operations and addressing the evolving needs of their merchants. However, most are still holding onto unscalable legacy systems, which are filled with makeshift solutions to address issues for their larger clients. Improving these systems is painstakingly slow and impedes growth at fast-growing companies.
Contemporary businesses and operators, like Our Place, develop tailored backend solutions to enhance their operational flexibility. These backends are pieced together using a blend of top-tier solutions, progressively replacing conventional ERPs. ShipBob provides APIs that are agnostic to merchants’ chosen backend solutions. Merchants can seamlessly input order data from diverse channels and extract fulfillment data to generate an array of alerts, notifications, or reports. This capability enables them to focus on managing exceptions and maintain a lean operational workforce.
Regarding warehouse operations, ShipBob provides technology that empowers every warehouse worker. These workers not only receive information on which items to pick and which box to use, but they also have access to a visual aid though a GIF, guiding them on the optimal positioning of items within the box for maximum efficiency.
Expanding to four warehouses with ease
We’ve recognized the importance of having a network of warehouses spanning the United States, as it’s crucial for us to be geographically close to our customers. Setting up four warehouses has been remarkably straightforward from a technological standpoint. ShipBob’s technology streamlines inventory management across our network, ensuring optimal inventory allocation.
Once the inventory is allocated correctly, passing orders to ShipBob is seamless. ShipBob automatically routes orders to the nearest warehouse to the customer. We receive notifications confirming the warehouse selected for shipping, eliminating inventory discrepancies between the warehouses. Efficient inventory allocation significantly impacts our outbound shipping costs, and with ShipBob, managing this has been effortless.
Saving $1.5M in freight costs while cutting fulfillment speed in half
By leveraging ShipBob’s US fulfillment network, we’ve significantly reduced shipping times. Previously, it would take us five to six business days to deliver items to customers. However, with the utilization of four of ShipBob’s US fulfillment centers, the average delivery time has been reduced to just two and a half days from order receipt to customer receipt.
Expanding our warehouse network from 2 to 4 warehouses has translated into substantial cost savings, amounting to $1.5 million in freight expenses for Our Place. Currently, only 2% of our parcels are reaching Zone 7 or Zone 8 collectively, indicating that 98% of our parcels are reaching Zones 1 through 6. By shipping locally to lower zones, we’re achieving the most significant reductions in outbound costs.
“Expanding our warehouse network from 2 to 4 warehouses has translated into $1.5 million in freight cost savings for Our Place. It also cut our fulfilment and shipping times in half, from 5 or 6 days to just 2.5 days.”
Ali Shahid, COO of Our Place
Driving $500,000 per day in additional holiday revenue while delivering before Christmas
Being near our customers wasn’t just essential for delivering an exceptional customer experience; it also significantly boosted our revenue. Our Place’s products are readily gifted, which means that each day we can ship orders before a major holiday translates into over half a million dollars in revenue.
Pre-ShipBob, the last day customers could place orders and receive them by Christmas was around the 15th or 16th of December. Now, we can extend that to the 19th or 20th, confident that even with cost-effective ground shipping, we’ll deliver the items in time for the holiday. This extension allows us to capture an additional 4 or 5 days of revenue, totaling over two million dollars.
Streamlining DTC & B2B fulfilment through a single partner
Having the same partner handle both direct-to-consumer and business-to-business orders is crucial. Managing separate inventory pools for DTC and wholesale can be challenging, making it essential to maintain unified inventory across all channels.
ShipBob enables us to serve both our direct-to-consumer (DTC) customers and our business-to-business (B2B) clients, which include Nordstrom, Target, Bloomingdales, and Saks. This encompasses direct vendor shipments and B2B wholesale operations, all managed seamlessly across ShipBob’s warehouse network. Outbound freight costs from our warehouses to theirs are lower with our nationwide footprint, regardless of who is covering the cost.
Achieving line item visibility for more transparent billing
Few merchants feel entirely at ease with the bills they receive from their fulfillment partners.
With ShipBob, billing becomes straightforward and transparent. All billing data seamlessly integrates into our own technology stack, allowing us to automatically calculate the expected charges for each parcel. We can easily compare these calculated amounts with the actual charges, eliminating any guesswork. This level of transparency instills confidence in the accuracy of the bills we receive from ShipBob.
I couldn’t fathom reverting to our previous billing practices with prior 3PL partners. We would receive Excel spreadsheets and struggle to verify if the dimensions and weights of our shipped parcels were accurate. We had to rely solely on the word of our old 3PL. Determining whether a carrier had added a particular accessorial charge was challenging, and often, the charges seemed unjustified. Nearly every month, we found ourselves having to request credits due to discrepancies.
After transitioning to ShipBob, I receive a consolidated bill encompassing all picking, packing, and outbound freight charges. There’s no ambiguity regarding the bill’s accuracy since it’s purely mathematical. We conduct our own calculations, compare them to the line-item bill we receive, and if there are no disparities between the expected and actual charges, we proceed with confidence.
Enabling custom packaging and pristine unboxings
When a new customer receives a product from us, it marks their initial interaction with our brand, demanding a flawless and impeccable experience — a standard ShipBob’s technology enables us to achieve.
For instance, we required the use of our custom packaging instead of ShipBob’s standard boxes, and ShipBob seamlessly accommodated this request.
Furthermore, we prioritize sustainability by avoiding the use of plastic in any of our outbound packages, a practice ShipBob fully supports. This commitment to sustainability aligns with our dedication to providing an exceptional customer experience.
ShipBob not only integrates our custom packaging into their processes but also incorporates it into their boxing algorithm. This ensures that every parcel is packed in the appropriately sized box, maximizing efficiency. With ShipBob’s technology, we can promptly identify whether items are being packed in the most space-efficient manner or if there are opportunities for improvement based on item dimensions.
Scaling globally with ShipBob in Australia and Canada
A single integration with ShipBob allows us to scale globally. Partnering with ShipBob has enabled us to store inventory and ship orders out of fulfillment centers in Australia and Canada.
Every ShipBob fulfillment center runs on the same core technology platform. By unifying globally through ShipBob, the work that we do once is made available across the entire warehouse network.
“In 2024, we should be shipping over 1 million parcels out of the ShipBob network. The global scale of ShipBob’s network allows us to go to multiple markets without taking on additional technology costs.”
Ali Shahid, COO of Our Place
Our Place’s team at ShipBob
Eric Leonard
Eric is the Merchant Success Manager at ShipBob who supports Our Place.
Cole Shubert
Cole is an Account Executive at ShipBob, and helps support Our Place.
Divey Gulati
Divey is the Co-Founder and COO of ShipBob, and serves as the Executive Sponsor for Our Place.
Get started with ShipBob
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