The lung of our business. Our logistics center | Minimalism Brand

In this post we bring to light one of the main organs of our business network. Our lung, the one that gives us air and allows us to breathe.

But before talking about our logistics center, we must return to one month of our existence to put ourselves in context:

September: when this whole game started we had 250 wallets in our offices, with their corresponding boxes, cards and stickers.

As the orders from the first customers arrived, we packed them and went to send them to the Post Office . All very manual. We got excited about every order that came in, still does, and had to trial and error to figure out the best way to ship: a small box, an envelope, how many fit in each box, shipping costs, shipping weights, how much weighs the packaging... and a long etc that we were learning as we went.

Sales were gradually increasing and we were forced to spend a little more time packing and shipping the orders that were coming in. The process was learned, you always have to keep learning, but we had it quite refined. We packed the first 200 ourselves and we realized what was the best way to send it, having data on weight, measurements, number of bags, profitability of the packs...

We keep taking orders out. Wallet, envelope, sticker, card and ride to post office. We knew that it was not the best way to do it and, above all, we knew that it was not scalable at all . We have several anecdotes but I remember a series of orders sent from an office in Santander where one of the partners was spending the weekend, made during the trip and sent on a Saturday morning to be shipped on Monday. Yes, we went on a trip with bags to send just in case orders fell...

We continued like this until everything blew up with the offer that put us on the market on October 19, we found ourselves with about 900 orders to serve, an overstocked stock and a lack of labor to take out those orders.

For the first 400, we locked ourselves up for two weekends at Livink Coworking , pulling anyone who wanted to help. Couples, friends, friends of friends, people who wanted part of the company's shares 😉 Special mention to Pablo, Rocío, Manuel and Belén who were "playing" almost every day.

For the other 600 orders, we had a 20-day margin until we received the next bag order and it was clear to us that all logistics: storage, order management, handling and shipping could be outsourced. As long as we applied the knowledge we had acquired and, why not, added the knowledge of other specialists in the logistics sector.

We had several options on the table: post office, other transport companies with which we had not worked, and even creating our own logistics center.

We finally reached an agreement with Turylogictics , located in Becerril de la Sierra and managed by Carlos and José Luis, fundamental pieces to make our decision.

We start the integration with your platform at the same time that we migrate our website to shopify, we will talk about this in another post. With the integration we managed to make the process "simple":

• drop an order
• Your platform reads our shopify every 15 minutes
• Dump the order with all the data on the platform
• The order is packed and shipped

Without a doubt, the logistics center is, together with the handbags, the highest expense we have, but it allows us to be sure that the orders will be sent correctly, on time and without depending on us directly. Leaving us enough time to continue thinking about how to grow the company.

If you have an ecommerce and have ever doubted whether to outsource this process, our experience is 100% positive. These are some of the advantages we have found:

• We do not need a warehouse in our offices . What is the point of a warehouse in the center of Madrid where the square meter is a paste if we can have it somewhere else?
• The staff is not your own staff. We only hire the service. If we need more employees they size, not us.
• We can take out 10 orders or 1000 . Now yes, we are totally scalable.
• They take care of sending us to grow sales. Everyone does the job they know how to do.
• There is direct communication even on weekends.
• We negotiate shipping prices with them and they negotiate with carriers. By having a high volume of shipments, by having several clients, the price they have is lower than what we could negotiate directly with the carriers.
• We can ship worldwide , this will be done very soon.
• Orders are delivered in 72 hours approx. or in 24 if the client wishes. It allows us to remain agile even as we continue to grow.

This lung allows us to breathe by focusing all our energies on boosting sales, creating collaborations, developing an affiliate network or working with influencers.

Without a doubt, our logistics center is one of the pillars of this company. If we want to continue growing, as we have in mind, we must have a very solid base.

If you have a small e-commerce and you are considering implementing this distribution model, write us an email at hola@minimalism.es, we will be delighted to open the doors of the business for you and for you to develop your own.

We continue to grow and breathe.