Prepared for the best and the worst
Six months before the world first heard whispering of a pandemic, Allen and CEO Jason Ojalvo went looking for a solution that would suit their needs should they scale. Little did they know they would need to handle scale order fulfillment ten times and onboard a 3PL in a weekend.
"Jason and I knew that we were at a place where we didn't necessarily need an order management system right away," says Allen remembering the search for Skubana. "We were doing this in preparation of being at the scale we are at now. When I say it was one of the best decisions we've made in the past year, it's because we knew we were making a decision in anticipation of growth."
Support in times of uncertainty.
COVID-19 deeply affected many online businesses in a negative way, especially at the beginning of the crisis. Following their best sales day of all time, Tushy was able to pivot from an on-demand fulfillment company to a backorder company in days.
"Skubana has been essential in supporting us in a time of terrible uncertainty and scale. Not only have we scaled 10X in a matter of months, but we're navigating a completely different inbound and outbound supply chain. Skubana has been able to scale alongside us from an order volume perspective and helped us onboard a new 3PL in lightning-fast time to change our supply change completely."
Cutting lead times in half
In the two weeks following the crisis, Skubana and Tushy shortened lead times from a 60-day to 90-days to 20 to 25-day lead time; that's end-to-end from order placement to factory to the customer's hands.
Making that work requires favorable margins and economics, but it also requires a platform like Skubana. The fact that operations wasn't getting in the way of those strategic decisions was vital to their success. As Allen says, "Skubana was essential to allowing operations to get out of the way and be an enabler instead of a reason to not do things."
During the height of the pandemic, Tushy's order volume was 10-12 times what it was pre-pandemic. In addition to handling the increased order volumes, Tushy was able to seamlessly create a virtual warehouse to track their pre-orders, and then move them accordingly to the warehouse that they think would best fulfill it.
"It sounds salesy, but I point to Skubana as one of the best decisions we've made in the last year and key to our success. I don't know if we wouldn't have been able reach this scale and complexity that we're confronting."
More control
Allen summarizes what Skubana has provided in a simple way. " I think one more that comes to mind is control. We were a Shopify Plus company that never did our own fulfillment, and we had a supply chain that made our lives unnecessarily difficult."
As it was, Tushy's systems struggled with warehouse fulfillment, managing inventory and orders across warehouses, and splitting orders. The team got used to working that way, but were frustrated at best. "We weren't owners of the system," Allen says. "We were not necessarily in control." As they grew, it became clear that they needed to exact control over our fulfillment. By adding OMS functions, Allen hoped to to reduce fulfillment time frames, which would lead to customers getting the products faster.
With Skubana, Allen is able to pull certain levers that he wouldn't have otherwise been able to pull if he were beholden to a single fulfillment source or even a single 3PL. Now it's the people who know best and care the most–Allen and his team–controlling where the orders go, how they're fulfilled, and checking in on their status. They're able to act fast and ensure that Tushy delivers a high-quality customer experience by moving orders out quickly and promptly.
