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Building an exceptional multi-channel ecommerce fulfillment experience -- from scratch – for an established, premium, brick and mortar brand
California Closets was already an established leader in the custom closets and home storage space when it set out to find a 3PL partner to launch its first-ever ecommerce offerings. The company’s customer experience bar was already very high, as California Closets had spent the past four decades successfully creating its premium brand, working hand-in-hand with customers at its hundreds of brick and mortar design rooms across the country to provide an excellent, high quality customer service experience.
So when the company set out to launch its first ecommerce offerings, it insisted on finding a 3PL that could support and sustain its reputation as a premium brand by continuing to deliver an exceptional customer experience in its new online channel.
California Closets focused its search on finding a partner that could successfully provide and manage four important criteria for its ecommerce fulfillment solution:
1) customized packaging,
2) customized product inspection requirements,
3) a turnkey technology solution, and
4) a cost-effective process that included all of the above.
While California Closets was clear on its ecommerce requirements when it began the process, it wasn’t sure a 3PL actually existed that could meet all four of these criteria. Some 3PLs were too regional, and the shipping costs they offered were too high. Other 3PLs were unable to handle the company’s customized packaging and product inspection requirements, and others lacked a technology solution sophisticated enough to move sufficiently quickly in getting the new ecommerce channel set up and running.
The company's leadership team worried that an ideal solution that checked all of their boxes perhaps did not exist. But based on a referral from a long-standing Mochila client (a fellow California-based company, apparel brand Marine Layer), California Closets learned of Mochila's unique approach and reached out to the Mochila team to learn more.
Following those initial conversations with Mochila, the California Closets team felt a huge sense of relief and renewed hope that their seemingly unicorn solution did in fact exist.
Joey Haag-Martin, Senior Director of Merchandising, recounts the California Closets’ leadership team’s impressions after their initial conversations with Mochila:
We were immediately impressed with their ability to support our branded packaging needs - packing slip, boxes, tape, and inserts. As we dug deeper, we discovered Mochila also had the technology to support our ecommerce, marketplace, and wholesale channels as well as the infrastructure to scale with low costs, all while providing exceptional service and the guidance of a true expert advisor.
California Closets ultimately selected Mochila as its 3PL partner, and worked together with Mochila to create a smart, creative, technology-forward process for developing and launching fulfillment capabilities for the brand new ecommerce venture.
The following three steps were critical in evolving this premium, historically brick and mortar-only brand into its new ecommerce channels.
Mochila helped California Closets set up their systems to support the fulfillment of two separate ecommerce channels. Both direct-to-consumer orders and pick-up-in-store orders would be fulfilled from a single pool of inventory using a unified system, allowing California Closets to grow sales across channels without having to invest in additional infrastructure or separate pools of inventory.
To accomplish this, Mochila worked with California Closets’ technical leads to install Mochila’s Shopify app to seamlessly sync items, inventory, orders, and shipping confirmations between the two systems. California Closets also took advantage of Mochila’s virtual bundles feature, which allowed them to list a multi-part inventory item such as a closet system for sale in Shopify as a single SKU, and Mochila’s system would automatically translate that SKU into all of the component parts required for a specific shipment to a customer.
Next, inventory was distributed across Mochila’s fulfillment centers to ensure product was always close to customers, keeping shipping costs low and delivery times short. In addition, California Closets took advantage of Mochila’s shipping discounts to further lower its costs.
Finally, California Closets and Mochila developed a customized, branded packaging slip that would be placed in a branded envelope and included with every order. Mochila also enabled California Closets to use branded packaging tape with Mochila’s supply of unbranded boxes. Since the business was new, the company was not ready to commit to large order quantities of branded boxes that might turn out not to be optimal size or construction. This gave them the flexibility they needed to launch and scale their business efficiently.
California Closets has successfully grown their ecommerce business over 20x since their initial launch, while also expanding their SKU count over 5x.
After its initial launch, the company leveraged Mochila's expertise to improve and evolve its ecommerce business; a sampling of these successes are provided below:
--> By implementing an inspection process and storing additional supplies, Mochila and California Closets worked to expand returns processing to restore over 30% more returned units to sellable stock.
--> After seeing a sudden spike in damages for a few specific SKUs, the two companies collaborated on a new scheme for packing product for transport in ocean freight containers which reduced the amount of product damaged in transit by as much as 20%.
--> California Closets and Mochila worked together to implement a new freight carrier that combined the key elements of the cost of freight shipping with some of the higher-end customer experiences of white glove delivery, resulting in: lower shipping costs, fewer damaged products, and all of the packages arriving at the same time (versus the inconsistency of a small parcel carrier like FedEx or UPS).
Mochila’s partnership with California Closets illustrates how a strong 3PL relationship – supported by a high-performing brand’s clear vision and communication of its requirements, coupled with a smart 3PL partner’s technical expertise and ability to execute – can help support major changes and evolutions to a brand’s sales channel and growth strategies in an efficient, cost-effective manner.
Building a company’s first-ever ecommerce fulfillment solution is no easy task, but together, California Closets and Mochila were able to develop and deliver a solution that allowed the brand to grow and modernize its business while remaining faithful to its commitment to the superior customer experience its customers had relied on for decades - whether online or at one of their design showroom locations on the ground.
Wondering if Mochila can help launch your ecommerce business? Schedule a call a call with us to learn more.
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