#14 Casey Armstrong: When is the right time to outsource fulfilment for your ecommerce brand? (ft. Shipbob)
Find us: Head to our community page to register & join the MindfulCommerce community as an expert, brand or merchantInstagram: @mindfulcommerceFacebook @MindfulCommerceContact Us - info@mindfulcommerce.ioWhere to find One Circular World: Shipbob - Website Where to find Casey Armstrong:Casey Armstrong - Email: carmstrong@shipbob.com Links Mentioned in Episode: Pachamanoissue Shownotes: Krissie Leyland 0:00 Hello, and welcome to the MindfulCommerce Podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands and service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. I'm Krissie Rich Bunker 0:11 I'm Rich, and we're your hosts. This podcast is an extension of the MindfulCommerce Community. Krissie Leyland 0:18 The MindfulCommerce Community is a safe place for ecommerce brands and experts to connect, collaborate and explore opportunities to work together to unleash the power of ecommerce as a force for good. Rich Bunker 0:30 You can join by going to mindfulcommerce.io, and clicking "community". See you there. Krissie Leyland 0:35 Hello, everyone. Today, we'll be speaking to Casey, who is the CMO of Shipbob. We will be discussing when if ever is the right time to outsource warehousing and fulfillment for your ecommerce brand. So welcome Casey, it's really great to have you on here. I've wanted to for ages because you are one of our very first community supporters. So thank you so much for that. Would you like to just introduce yourself and tell me a bit about shipbob? And why Shipbob exists? Casey Armstrong 1:09 Yes. Well, thank you very much for having me. You know, we're very happy to be part of the MindfulCommerce Community. We take the carbon neutrality and everything very seriously over here at Shipbob, which I know we're gonna dive into. We are a global fulfillment platform. We serve and are partnered with over 5000 brands. We ship millions of items every single month. We actually are up to almost 25 fulfillment centers, including one in the UK, one in Canada, one in Ireland, one in Australia, which we just announced last week, and about 20 in the US. So, I'm very happy to be here. Krissie Leyland 1:51 Wow, that's amazing. That's a lot. I was actually gonna ask you how many fulfillment centers you have but you just answered that question. It's great that you've got one in the UK. So in your opinion, when is the right time for brands to outsource their warehousing and fulfillment to companies such as Shipbob? Casey Armstrong 2:13 There's no hard answer where it's like, "once you're doing 100 orders a month." I think it's when you start seeing that the time it takes you to fulfill,and ship items starts to impact the time that you have to focus on sales, marketing, community development & product development, because that's what's actually going to drive your business. I know a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of hesitant to like hand things over. Unless logistics and operations is your differentiator from your competition... I think it behooves a lot of founders to hand that off sooner than not so they can focus on the right things, logistics, and fulfillments, very time intensive, which is often your most valuable asset. If you're staying up till eight o'clock at night, midnight, 2am, during peak season to pick and pack boxes, it's probably not the best use of your time. Krissie Leyland 3:18 There are brands doing that. Casey Armstrong 3:20 Oh, we hear that all the time. It's honestly the catalyst for [almost all of our customers] to reach out to and start working with us rather quickly. They start seeing the time that they're spending on it. Sometimes, even worse is subconsciously, they're purposely thwarting their own growth: "I want to double my sales. I want to double my business but that means I'm gonna have to ship twice as many items. I don't want to stay up for an extra two hours or four hours every single day to pick and pack boxes." Then if you're gonna start hiri
