Case Study:
Retrospec
Overview
Retrospec wants to make everyone feel at home in the open air. Since selling its first bike in 2009, Retrospec has helped millions experience what the outdoors has to offer with expertly designed, durably crafted, accessibly priced gear, including bikes, e-bikes, longboards, paddleboards, snowboarding equipment and more that inspire adventure and enable exploration.
Benefits and Key Outcomes
Reduced order processing times
Ability to rate shop before the order is picked
Ability to bulk print shipping labels
“Our previous process was slow because we had to do things one-by-one. There just wasn’t enough time in the day to keep our manual processes. We would have had to keep adding more people just to keep up.”
Ely Khakshouri,
CEO at Retrospec
Challenge
During the early days of COVID-19, with lockdowns, new work-from-home situations, and virtual school, demand for bikes had never been higher. For Retrospec, that meant orders increased rapidly, and its former pack and ship process just wasn’t going to cut it. Serving its network of almost 500 dealers as well as Amazon customers, Retrospec needed a streamlined and automated way to keep up with orders.
The previous pack and ship process required multiple clicks and scans to process just one shipment, which translated into a lot of time and human resources to fulfill orders. “Our previous process was slow because we had to do things one-by-one,” said Ely Khakshouri, CEO at Retrospec. “There just wasn’t enough time in the day to keep our manual processes. We would have had to keep adding more people just to keep up.”
Retrospec also wanted to be able to rely on an automated system to rate shop for shipping rather than a manual, people-intensive process. Most of their orders weren’t complex, in fact, 90% ship in their own containers, are pre-packed, and Retrospec already had the dimensions needed to rate shop, but when the orders would get to the pack table, they slowed down the entire process.
“We weren’t doing a lot of labor-intensive stuff – our pickers were keeping up with the flow but it was the printing of labels and not being able to bulk print shipping labels that was slowing us down,” said Khakshouri. “We needed something that would let us produce the labels faster and more efficiently.”
Solution
Since implementing ShipHawk, the Retrospec team has gained efficiencies throughout the pack and ship process. Today, Retrospec utilizes ShipHawk to automatically rate shop well before the order is picked so by the time it gets to the packing table, there’s no waiting around. Each order is shipped with the best carrier and shipping level to meet customer requirements without any human decision making.
Retrospec was able to streamline the warehouse by removing the roadblocks impacting packing and shipping. Order processing time was positively impacted by a shipping and fulfillment solution that processes orders through its own platform and then automatically pushes completed shipment data into NetSuite – allowing orders to be processed drastically faster than in native NetSuite while maintaining real-time visibility.
“What ShipHawk does well is rate shop before the order gets to picking and on top of that, the ability to bulk print labels fast.”
Ely Khakshouri
Additional benefits included:
- Removed manual decisions
- Removed the need for unnecessary clicks and scans
- Automated rate shopping
- Automated batch label printing
“We saw eCommerce explode – we were selling bikes in the middle of a pandemic. ShipHawk came through for us in a big way when we needed them most.”
Ely Khakshouri