Scaling Global Wholesale Business with IoT: A Case Study on Fellow

• Functional Applications - Inventory Management Systems
• Functional Applications - Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)

• Consumer Goods
• Retail

• Procurement
• Warehouse & Inventory Management

• Inventory Management
• Retail Store Automation

Fellow, a company known for its beautifully crafted brewing tools, experienced rapid growth, expanding from a team of 20 to 80 with plans to grow by another 50% within a year. The company sells its products to a wide range of retailers across 50 countries. However, as Fellow grew, it became increasingly difficult to balance selling to large retail accounts like Nordstrom while still supporting small, independent coffee shops that form the backbone of Fellow's business model. The challenge was to maintain the company's focus on the specialty coffee community and continue to work with small retailers, despite the lack of bandwidth to manually set up hundreds of new wholesale accounts and manage national retail accounts.

Fellow is a company that crafts beautiful, thoughtfully-designed brewing tools. The company's products range from kettles to mugs and grinders. Fellow's goal is to help customers make ridiculously good coffee. The company sells its products to a wide range of retailers across 50 countries, including large retail accounts like Nordstrom and small, independent coffee shops. Despite its rapid growth and expansion, Fellow remains committed to supporting the specialty coffee community and small retailers.

Fellow turned to automation to solve its challenge. The company already used Zapier to send leads from a web form into their CRM. Recognizing the potential of the automation platform, Fellow decided to overhaul its entire wholesale customer onboarding process with Zapier. Now, when a new wholesale lead fills out a form powered by Jotform, Zapier automatically records it in Copper (the team's CRM) and assigns it to the right person for approval. Once approved, Zapier automatically sends out personalized onboarding materials to the new customer, including the right tax forms based on the customer's location. After the customer fills out the forms, another set of Zaps uploads the documents to Google Drive and sets up the customer in Shopify with the correct tax settings and wholesale discount. This automation has drastically decreased manual touchpoints and tedious tasks.

• The use of Zapier has not only created a smooth experience for customers of all sizes but also helped Fellow manage critical internal processes like order modification, inventory management, and feature development. For instance, Zapier allows Fellow to easily modify eCommerce orders when a customer needs to make a change, providing a better customer experience and helping the support team work more efficiently. Automation has also empowered Fellow to create an easier way to stay on top of inventory. Furthermore, Zapier has unlocked customer data across the company, ensuring that order fulfillment data is up-to-date across apps and allowing the company to prioritize feature requests by seeing how many customers are asking for a certain product or feature. Overall, automation has become the backbone of Fellow's entire customer experience and has significantly contributed to the company's rapid growth and expansion.

• Automation has reduced the time spent on supporting wholesale customers to 8-10 hours per week, which is 4 times faster than managing the process manually.

• Fellow has been able to support thousands of smaller wholesale accounts without increasing order minimums or annual spend.

• The company has expanded from a team of 20 to 80 and plans to grow by another 50% within a year.