Say you’re in charge of an emerging e-commerce business in the health and wellness space. Your brand sells vitamins and supplements through a variety of channels, and thanks to the backing of one of today’s top influencers, is seeing sales skyrocket. One morning, a customer in Florida orders your multivitamin from your brand’s website and another in Idaho buys a two-pack on Walmart.com. Due to the “Amazon effect,” both customers expect their vitamins delivered the following day. But neither of these sales were placed through Amazon.
Amazon’s efficient fulfillment services are fine for brands selling mostly on Amazon. But it’s not necessarily the best fit for multichannel merchants, who need to maintain efficiency and control over the customer experience, no matter where an order is placed.
Flowspace, an independent e-commerce logistics and fulfillment company founded in 2017, provides solutions to those challenges. With a network of more than 150 warehouses across the U.S., the seven-year-old company is helping brands reliably meet the expectations of modern consumers, fulfilling orders rapidly while connecting all their sales channels and insights on one platform.
Thanks to Flowspace, those shoppers in Florida and Idaho will receive their vitamins the next day—and your business earns two more happy customers on its ascent to the top of the wellness world.
“Supply chain management used to be a back-office function,” says Ben Eachus, the company’s cofounder and CEO. “Today’s merchants understand it’s actually critical in delivering a good customer experience.”
Flowspace’s innovations are helping to push supply chain into the spotlight, driving growth for emerging brands and earning this rising star a spot on Fast Company’s list of the world’s Most Innovative Companies for 2024.
SELLING THROUGH MULTIPLE CHANNELS
Merchants today are increasingly embracing an omnichannel approach—and the channels keep proliferating. Many businesses now offer products on their website, on a variety of social media platforms, on one or more third-party online marketplaces, and in physical stores.
“The explosion of different sales channels has been a great opportunity, but also a great challenge for brands,” Eachus says. That’s because the inventory and fulfillment processes for each channel need to be integrated to ensure that shoppers receive orders in a timely manner. If a merchant were to allocate inventory by channel, it would risk running out of stock if a certain item suddenly went viral on a social media platform.
Flowspace’s innovative fulfillment software helps brands accommodate orders on multiple channels. Its platform doesn’t silo inventory according to channel, helping brands maintain a consistent flow of delivery.
And the company is committed to embracing new channels as they arise. In 2023, for example, it became the first-ever U.S. fulfillment partner for TikTok Shop, a powerful source of discovery and sales for today’s brands. Flowspace’s software is directly integrated with the TikTok Shop API, which helps brands provide consistent and fast fulfillment for shoppers who discover products on TikTok.
EMBRACING AI
Last year also saw the development of Flowspace AI to help optimize fulfillment-related processes, make customer workflows more efficient, and drive business insights. In the near future, Eachus sees AI further refining Flowspace’s abilities by using scenario planning to optimize inventory and carrier decisions. “Shipping cost is typically 15% to 20% of a brand’s overall spend,” Eachus says. “Flowspace’s AI tools can help drive the cost down.”
Ultimately, powering growth for emerging brands is what drives Flowspace to continue innovating. It’s not unusual for customers to reduce their shipping costs by as much as 50%, allowing brands to scale without taking on the cost of a large supply chain team. Results like that helped Flowspace double the amount of new business contracts it added in 2023, compared to the amount it added in the previous year.
More Flowspace customers, Eachus says, leads to more satisfied shoppers. “That’s the power of bundling supply chain services together with fulfillment software,” he says. “Our customers look good in front of their end customers.” And that keeps both sets of customers coming back.
Ren Ecosystem