Chubbies, a San Francisco-based lifestyle apparel brand, was looking to reduce its manual fulfillment processes and increase inventory visibility in order to drive order accuracy and customer satisfaction.
James Hargett, who handles fulfillment and customer service for Chubbies, said he was spending at least half of each day on things like communicating orders to a third-party logistics provider and updating add-on products sent through Chubbies’s loyalty program. Its inventory management system provided his team with limited visibility which affected inventory counts, causing fulfillment and forecasting issues.
Chubbies chose Stitch Labs’s Enterprise API to address these issues. For instance, by syncing its loyalty program with the Stitch API, Chubbies can swap reward gifts in and out easily. “If we want to change a gift in a loyalty tier round, I can do that in 5-10 minutes,” Hargett said. “Previously, that would have taken two days.”
[Get news like this delivered to your inbox every week. | Subscribe to O+F Advisor today!]
In addition to customizing its workflow through Stitch, Chubbies is now able to fulfill orders more efficiently.
“If, for example, a customer inputted an address incorrectly, we only had about a six-hour window before the item shipped to the wrong address, Hargett said. “It was very manual and time-consuming to program or pause orders directly with our 3PL. Now, we can pause them between when they’re placed and when they’re fulfilled.”
Increased inventory and fulfillment visibility enables Chubbies to create better, more accurate order forecasts.
“With a better picture of our inventory and what’s heading out and what’s available, we have accurate data for forecasting,” Hargett said. “Instead of looking at multiple systems and various spreadsheets, when you have them all centralized in Stitch, you can run a report at the click of a button. It’s super easy to get the data you need to make smart business decisions.”
With an efficient fulfillment process and automated updates for its loyalty program and inventory tracking, Hargett said Chubbies is able to achieve a 98% customer satisfaction rate. He said Stitch has helped enable this because the time saved in fulfillment and inventory processes gives his team more time to focus on the customer experience.
“It used to take me four hours every time I wanted to upload our inventory,” Hargett said. “Now it’s a 15-minute process. That’s three hours and 45 minutes of my day, thanks to Stitch, that I can spend on other, more important tasks. And when you release new products as often as we do, sometimes up to three times a week, that’s a lot of time saved.”