Dunn-Rite Products Does Seller Fulfilled Prime with Cahoot

Foreign. My name is Manish Chaudhary. I'm the founder and CEO of Kahoot. I'm joined here with Teddy Dunn of Dunnright Products. Welcome Teddy, tell us a little bit about yourself and your company, what you do.

We have a family company that's. It's based in Indianapolis or north of Indianapolis that does kind of a couple different things. It does pool games, injection molding and it's kind of a manufacturing assembly company. One of the first things I did there was or here was kind of tried to get our E commerce going. At the time we just had informational website and we sold to a third party reseller on Amazon. So we really grew by leaps and bounds by, by going direct to consumer e commerce and then cut out the middleman on Amazon. And it's been a very robust growth period. Covid made the industry explode but also challenging and with supply chains and basically I heard of, heard of you guys. Kahoot by the SFP program was reopening which we had great success on in 2017 and 18. But with the, with the new program we need a, a more complex system to be able to hit the metrics. And that's our kind of new focus right now is getting back on SFP instead of FBA because we have big, big oversized boxes.

That's awesome. And so what, what was it like before our product or service? I know you have several warehouses. Yeah, you've got a very thriving, you know, multiple businesses that different lines of products. So just from an operations standpoint if you, if you could share what was life like before Kahoot?

Where it does get troublesome is it's very expensive for oversized boxes and sometimes Amazon can be very slow in checking things in. When we heard about SFP coming back and trying to grow our E commerce site, one of the things that we ran into was working with different 3pls. They didn't want to intermesh with our warehouse in Elwood. We also have a warehouse in Colorado. So we have pretty good coverage of the country but not good enough for Sellersville Prime. So I ran into multiple issues with three PLs not wanting to partnership with our warehouses which you know, with our coverage we really needed to. And but the other thing about, about using FBA is it's very expensive. It's. Their storage costs are high, they lose inventory, their, their fees are very high. And so I was really looking at a way to get around that. And also with an end goal of growing our website with offering quicker shipping. So that's kind of where we we settled.

Sure, sure. And so what was your experience dealing with this different 3pls both?

Yeah, it started with googling 3pls that are SFP approved, which many of them don't want to, you know, advertise that they, they can do that because they have to then meet very stringent, you know, metrics ship on Saturdays, cutoffs at 2pm, have to have excellent coverage in multiple locations. And it was not, not very easy until, you know, I found a group like Kahoot. It's really cool because you have access to a lot more warehouses than say a 3 PL that has five to have perfect coverage in certain areas. I think Kahoot's network's a lot bigger and you can be more nimble. Like, you know, it was in the, in the SFP trial program, we kind of realized quickly that the metrics were a lot harder to hit. So Kahoot worked with us very quickly to get smaller amounts of goods into a couple East coast and California 3 PL or warehouses to help our metrics out. So I, I think it's, it's a lot more, it's, it's easier to work with. The customer service that you guys offer is great and I think it's a little less red tape to get stuff in quickly if you need to.

Before you got to work with Kahoot, what was going on in your head as a merchant, as a seller, with respect to, you know, Kahoot's model being a little different than the traditional three.

Pl, it was brilliant. I mean, I, I wondered why this already wasn't a, a big known software or, or method of finding an alternative to fba. If we were gonna, you know, in the old days, we did regional prime self fulfilled. It was still difficult because we had to go into the Amazon app, figure out who's going to ship what. A lot of phone calls back and forth. It's awesome because with a Kahoot software, each location logs on, they have a screen. What shows up, do you ship?

Your two warehouses are now integrated seamlessly as part of the, of the network. And what has that done to your warehouse operations even at the early stages, you know, compared to what, how you were fulfilling orders before, before Kahoot. Could you talk touch a little bit on that?

Sure, yeah. We would import orders, then we would, you know, print off a worksheet showing the different orders and then we would use a certain type of software called Starship to, to ship them. With Kahoot, it's amazing because it's all seamless. There is no importing. I import at the end of every month just to get all the shipped orders and invoice them. I don't have to manually import them to be able to ship them. It's a lot smoother. Once you get everything set up, it takes significant time off processing orders because once the packaging set up you could print 30 orders in a click. Whereas in the old system you had to manually enter the order, print each box individually.

Would you say that anybody who has more than one warehouse for them, Kahoot software is a no brainer based on your experience?

Based off our experience, yes. If you have more than one warehouse and you want to utilize both as a shipping location, I, I don't even know if there is another option.

What has been your experience with respect to is Kahoot only for small companies.

In terms of micro sellers, small businesses, medium sized businesses, large, large businesses that sell on fba. Any, any, any of them could do it. You know, if we didn't have any warehouses at all and we just had a, a place assemble them, we could still use Kahoot. But for us having two warehouses it was, it's the perfect fit.

From your experience with respect to accuracy, how has Kahoot been has performed across now 4, 5, 6 locations that your inventory spread out at you and you.

Made it very clear, take the time, do the work, get the setup correctly, then upload it. And once we did that been seamless. But I would advise people to absolutely take the two, three days to compile the data, have your team analyze it and make sure it's set up before you start. Because that would have been my advice was to get it set up correctly before you really are running.

How much time do you think your team is saving right now through compared to the old way manual collaborating with each other?

Well, again one example is in the summer there might be 80 orders for one unit over the weekend. Well that's 80 key in order entries, 80 clicks here and there, 80 clicks to print the label or 80 labels now that you know. Because a lot of these SKUs, one person orders, one SKU and that's it. You could print those 80 labels in however long it takes a zebra printer to print, thermal printer to print. So that's significant. There's a ton of communication savings between our two warehouses because, well, who wants to ship this one going to Texas? Well, I guess it's about the same. Who, who has more inventory? Well, it's just kind of Kahoot automatically calculates cheaper, faster delivery. So that's a ton of savings. What we're seeing is about half and half of our orders are shipped via Kahoot's account and half are ours. Well, every time we ship a small one, there's two to $7 savings that adds up, especially over the summer when we're, you know, shipping a ton of packages. So from a time standpoint, significant. From a processing standpoint, significant. And I suspect that a shipping savings will be significant over a long period of time.

Talk a little bit, Teddy, on about your experience, you know, with the Kahoot team during the onboarding and also, you know, seller four, four prime metrics.

It's so complex and hard to understand. It's really difficult to not have a partner that knows the specifics. For example, it's extremely difficult to stumble into and figure out you need someone that understands the metrics as best as anyone can. And I don't know if anyone really understands it because Amazon's kind of a black hole sometimes. But, but connecting with a group that has a sfp, a group of people that are experts in IT and can set up your templates, give you the best practices, it's the only way that I, I think you can be successful because it's, it's difficult, it's ever changing and you need to be able to have contacts and customer service react. When you have questions, really try to go with, with the expert's opinion. Don't, don't think you, you understand everything because you might not was what happened to me. And, and really try to trust that the savings are going to be there, albeit growth in sales, the actual shipping to the end customer. It's probably not the best way to go about it. Trying to maximize profit off the bat by having the minimal amount of warehouses. That's kind of what I learned.

How do you feel about your readiness to take on what may come now that you're on the Kahoot platform and technology?

Once you get the system set up, it's extremely scalable. You add SKUs, you add, you know, different e commerce platforms like your own website or Walmart. Because once you get everything mapped out, why not offer one or two day shipping on the Skus? There's no difference if you add one or two more platforms if you get inventory control.

Thank you, Teddy. You make it sound so easy.

Well, was not very difficult in the beginning, but once we got there, it's, it's pretty good.