In today’s episode, I have special guest Reese Hammerstrom talking to me about their new venture in distributing masks. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a shortage of masks on the market, and Nomad has decided to provide these masks to the public. 

However, these services are not available to the whole world, but rather professions and organizations where they are really needed. 

Reese is an eCommerce manager at Nomad goods and enjoys partaking in human and technological integration. He enjoys solving problems and creating new systems. 

Seeing that Nomad has contacts in China, did you hear about the pandemic a bit sooner than everyone else? And what shifts did you have to make? (02:26)

• Reese explains that there is a Chinese new year, which is similar to a Christmas holiday. All the factories shut down for about a week. Towards the end of their new year, COVID-19 became a real problem. 
• This obviously affected the product supply, and Reese says they weren’t too positive about the effects it was going to have on the world. 
• One of their suppliers approached them for help; they converted a production room into a clean room and purchased equipment to manufacture masks at a very high volume, and they needed help distributing these products to people that needed it the most. 
• Nomad has a Hong Kong-based warehouse, so they were able to bring products from China and offer affordable shipping into the US. Their main focus was on getting the product to medical facilities, hospitals, and people working directly with COVID patients. 
• They created a system whereby they could filter and vet people to determine whether they are eligible to receive these products. They weren’t going to open it up to the whole world. So the first challenge was creating a workflow to direct people to a place where they could fill out the information in order to be filtered. 

Tell us about the form software you ended up using to vet and filter people? (07:16)

• Reese says they are using Airtable, and the first option was to keep it simple with a form that requires just the necessary information like a name, email address and a text to describe your scenario. 
• They decided on Airtable from the beginning because of its ability to process different types of data, so that people can upload documents like a hospital badge for verification.
• People can select the quantity they need from 50 to 500, and Airtable allowed them to add new options into the form as they were receiving information. So if they saw that 80% of people ordered the maximum quantity, they could increase the maximum to 1000+.
• The Airtable form allows them to be very flexible in the required content for the application, and it feeds all the information to Airtable’s back end system, which is a magnificent piece of software. 
• Airtable also makes it relatively easy to connect to other systems and becoming the central database for the project. 

When you first created it, did it take long to decide what fields should go in this form? (08:39)

• The form was developed in conjunction with the website. In the process, the form became too big, and they scaled it down to only the basic information they needed from people. 
• They needed a name and contact details, and a section people could fill out about their unique situation. And then they need to wait for people to communicate; can they afford it, do they see the price in the form, and do they understand the shipping costs? 
• They added a section where people could indicate that they couldn’t afford it, and they needed a donation. Reese says they were surprised to find that not many people asked for donations. Those who needed a donation got fed into the donation workflow.
• They collect donations from the community to ship the masks to people who need it. 

In terms of volume, how have things ramped up from the very first shipment to where you are now? (10:35)

• When they decided to do this, they went live to the public six days later, and they launched the first shipment of 50 000 masks inbound to their Hong Kong warehouse. 
• Reese says they took a very manual approach the first time and created all the shipments in FedEx.com because they needed tight control over the customs documentation for the shipment. 
• The next shipment that came in was 60 000 units, and there is currently a shipment of 300 000 units inbound to Hong Kong. 
• They have already collected orders for more than 170 000 units, and there is a shipment coming into the US to fulfill large orders for local hospitals. They currently ordered around 4 million units. 

 How did you decide when it was time to automate, and when it was time to delegate? (20:49)

• Reese says they knew there was going to be manual work involved, so they were prepared for it. 
• In this case, the required automation was very technical and challenging, and it was beyond his scope. 
• He explains that they had a Shopify flow leading into a Google sheet, then Zapier takes the sheet and feeds all the information like orders and donations into Airtable. These are all things he has done before, so duplicating the automation for this project was easy. 
• However, interacting with the draft order API endpoint within Shopify was new to him, and it’s a lot more technical in terms of creating the order. 

Connect with Reese on LinkedIn

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