Case Study: How to BURST onto the scene, with ShipHero

Introduction

Masks are coming off and that means one thing… time to take care of your teeth again. Thankfully, the folks at BURST, a long-time ShipHero customer, are here with the affordable subscription service for oral care, championed by thousands of dental professionals across the USA.

BURST was co-founded by Hamish Khayat and Brittany Stewart in 2017, and in less than a year, they had already amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers. It’s no exaggeration to say that they “BURST”’ onto the e-commerce scene. By the end of 2019, the company reported 100% year-over-year growth and a 140% increase in ‘BURST Ambassadors.’ These brand advocates, including dentists and hygienists across the country, now number more than 20,000 strong.

“Since switching to ShipHero, we’ve reduced our fully-loaded costs by 35%. At the volumes we move, that’s huge.” Brittany Stewart, President and COO, BURSTFully-Loaded Cost means the direct cost of the applicable good, product or service plus indirect charges and overhead.

But as Brittany explains in our chat below, with meteoric growth comes challenges. Specifically, BURST’s 3PL partners were struggling to fulfill and ship orders at a breakneck pace that matched their growth.

Challenges

• Partnering with a 3PL to provide on-time shipping and fulfillment
• Ensuring the 3PL’s software can scale with 100% YoY growth
• Gaining order transparency to ensure BURST is able to deliver exceptional customer service
• Seamless integration with ShipHero APIs
• Fast and intuitive picking and packing capabilities for 3PL warehouse teams
• Visibility into order status for the customer experience team
• 100,000+ shipments per month
• Over 100% YoY growth w/ similar growth projected for the future

Brittany, what was your fulfillment process like BEFORE ShipHero?
‍Brittany Stewart: “We’re moving significant volumes—over a hundred thousand packages every single month. We’ve outgrown some 3PLs. The problem with most warehouses boiled down to their software capability—it wasn’t capable of scaling with our growth.

Honesty and transparency are so important in a 3PL partner. Issues are going to crop up—I just want to know about them. Our retention rate is directly tied to our ability to provide on-time fulfillment and unbelievable customer service. We can’t do that if we don’t know what’s going on.

We have a very close relationship with our fulfillment partner, Swoop. They started looking for a WMS that would help them scale with our growth. We tested out a lot of systems together, and nothing was quite as good as ShipHero”

Solution

ShipHero’s painless and intuitive warehouse management system. We also spoke with Brandon, the owner and CEO of Swoop (BURST’s 3PL provider).

Brandon, what has been your experience with ShipHero?
‍Brandon: “ShipHero has exceeded all expectations. For a lot of 3PLs, onboarding clients can be quite the task but ShipHero has found a way to make it very painless and very quick.” Getting set up with ShipHero was exceedingly simple. A dedicated solutions engineer visited Swoop’s warehouse to help Brandon and his team with migration, education, training, and rollout. Brandon describes it as a “true partnership” as opposed to just another piece of software you invest in and never wind up using. After that, using ShipHero within the warehouse is intuitive.ShipHero’s software is the perfect fit for e-commerce fulfillment 3PL warehouses looking to scale up. Part of what makes it such an effective solution is its seamless integration with must-have distribution platforms like Amazon.

Brittany, what was the integration process like for you?
‍Brittany: “We have a Fulfilled By Merchant (FBM) storefront on Amazon. It took us maybe a minute to integrate ShipHero into everything. Anyone who’s done FBM Amazon fulfillment knows that it can be a pain in the ass without the proper systems in place. With ShipHero, fulfillment is as easy as slapping labels onto packing slips. The integration is perfect and seamless. With ShipHero, fulfillment is as easy as slapping labels onto packing slips. The integration is perfect and seamless.”

And what have you been able to accomplish since the switch?
‍Brittany: “Through ShipHero, we have the ability to export our orders, get transparency into what’s moving, assess issues, purchase labels, and ship on our accounts. It’s all stuff you need—laid out in a way that’s intuitive and useful for you.

“We have a team of 30 people responding to customer requests full-time. With ShipHero, they can see what’s going on with an order, make notes, and talk to the warehouse—all through one user-friendly interface.”

ShipHero also provides much-needed visibility into the fulfillment process for Brittany’s team. With it, they’re able to maintain the same exceptional, high-level of customer service that first catapulted the BURST brand into the limelight.

ShipHero has even worked with Brittany directly to add options that increase back-end efficiency. For example, instead of needing to pick and weigh each order individually, the ‘bulk shipping’ feature allows warehouse staff to easily pick and ship hundreds of the same product—perfect for a company with limited SKUs.

And if anything ever is confusing, Brittany has an easy-to-navigate knowledge database at her fingertips—help.shradical.wpengine.com—and she knows that ShipHero’s team is always standing by to help.

Results

Fully-loaded costs cut by 35% or more.

Brittany, what have been the lasting results of switching to ShipHero?
‍Brittany: “We have unbelievable retention rates because we strive to create an incomparable experience for our customers. Robust and user-friendly software makes that possible. A solution like ShipHero pays for itself over and over again. In 2020, we anticipate our growth rate doubling native to the US. Projections indicate that we’ll grow another 60–70% the year after. As for international growth—that’s another beast for another day.

To make that growth a reality, ShipHero is vital. We need software that will scale with us as our volumes increase and we expand into multiple locations. The ability to do that without extensively programming lead times (i.e., logic for routing one thing to one place and another thing to another place) is helpful.

“Since switching to ShipHero, we’ve reduced our fully-loaded costs by 35%. At the volumes we move, that’s huge. Robust and user-friendly software makes our high retention rate]possible. A solution like ShipHero pays for itself over and over again.”

BURST continues to have extraordinary retention rates for a subscription-based business, and that’s wholly thanks to their stellar customer service and super-fast turnaround times. According to Brittany, ShipHero is part of the solution that enables them to continuously deliver that high-quality service.

With ShipHero, Brittany is confident that her 3PL has a software solution that will enable them to keep pace as BURST expands—which is good, because the company’s growth doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

BURST currently moves well over 100,000 packages each month. Brittany expects that number to double within a year—and that’s before BURST takes its products to an international market.ShipHero delivers simple and smart warehouse management that scales with you. Let’s talk.

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