Are you spending several hours packing boxes and shipping orders? Surrounded by boxes in your living room, your sitting room running out of space to store your inventory, or you need more time to grow your business so that you're not focused on packing and picking? Then this episode is going to be a great one for you because Nicole is talking to Dean Johnson, founder of The Hubb, which provides a variety of services from marketing and fulfilment to SMEs. They’ll be covering everything that you need to know from who would be the right partner, the questions that you need to ask, and if you're already using a fulfilment partner and you need to switch, what should you be looking out for?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• If you are focusing on the fulfilment and what to do with all these boxes, you're not focusing on growing the strategy that’s going to take your brand to that next level. 
• Dean works with startups who have never packed an order in their lives. A lot of the time the only real charge you'll come up against is storage, but Dean works with them to minimise their storage, maximise their replenishment rate, and really understand their inventory management. 
• Dean’s approach is to look at the founder and what they're trying to achieve and will produce a solution that fits around that. The Hubb has capacity allocated for people at all stages of their journey and that allows business owners to be flexible whether they are doing a handful of orders a month or  hundreds a day.
• One of the questions that is overlooked a lot of the time is one about insurance. It's assumed that their stock will be insured, however what you'll find with fulfilment partners is that it’s quite complex insuring somebody else’s stock. A lot of the time you are responsible for your own insurance. 
• Having someone that is delivering your postal experience the way you want it to be experienced is key. For example, if you were with a fulfilment centre like Amazon, it's coming in an Amazon box, that's it, that's all you are getting. But by having a more bespoke packing service you can dictate how it looks in and out of the box so you get the right unboxing experience for your customers. 

BEST MOMENTS

‘I found my superpower really is very much around the operational side of things, I found a real passion for processes’

‘Some fulfilment companies are not accepting returns at all at the moment’

‘Something that you can't teach is obviously to care, people either do or they don't’

EPISODE RESOURCES

The Fulfilment Hub

https://www.instagram.com/the_hubb_uk/

ABOUT THE GUEST 

“Having started and scaled multiple e-commerce brands myself, I could clearly see that there was a gap in the market for a bespoke end to end e-commerce service that didn't cost the earth.

Fulfilment centres tend to fit into the old style pick and pack units, or the new fulfilment mega-houses which provide a pretty cookie cutter approach, with little room for flexibility. I knew that a new approach was needed, and so I set about creating it!

Being in e-commerce it’s impossible not to be involved in marketing as at the end of the day it’s the biggest part of the job!

Starting with our passion for systems and processes, we leveraged all our learnings from running our own e-commerce stores and combined it with trends we see through the clients we work with to create our customer lifecycle framework.

Using this framework we are able to design, create, and implement a tailored solution for each client's needs, delivering a bespoke service - without a bespoke price tag.

We pride ourselves on our industry-busting low error rate, high client satisfaction, and team happiness.”

ABOUT THE HOST

Buying & retail expert Nicole Higgins spent the last 18 years working for companies such as Primark, M&S, Debenhams and Asda, sourcing & developing products from all over the world, building strategies for blue chip businesses, and increasing bottom line sales and profit, adding over £40 million in incremental business to the bottom line. 

Nicole now uses that experience and works as a consultant and coach for entrepreneurs and small to medium sized business owners, helping them start and scale their product businesses as The Buyer And Retail Coach (TM) 

Join the Start Scale Succeed waitlist. How to start & scale a product business. A 12 Week programme:  thebuyerandretailcoach.com/startscalesucceedwaitlist

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