We helped Tushy push through a crisis to transform the American bathroom
Before toilet paper became a rare and valuable commodity, Tushy was out to transform the American bathroom to be more sustainable, more healthy, and more delightful. And with what else, but bidets.
Like everything about Tushy, their goal is anything but modest. However, it's still a relatively small organization compared to giants in the bathroom industry like Georgia Pacific. As such, the COO and co-founder Justin Allen is involved with almost every piece of the business and works to factor the core pillars of the business into every decision he makes. Be it marketing, ops, supply chain, product, customer experience, everything is seen through those lenses.
So when Allen makes a supply chain decision, it's not only about what makes business sense, but what reduces consumption, reduces unnecessary material, reduces the company's carbon footprint.
And when a nationwide shortage of toilet paper caused the best sales day ever and an ensuing six-week wait for backorders, Allen and his team found ways to stay true to the brand by injecting humor and delight.
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.