Callie's Books sells children's sound books direct to consumers. They partnered with Kahoot to handle fulfillment and customer service across multiple sales channels, which let them scale without hiring a bigger team.
Tell our audience a little bit about Callie's Books and you know what, what you all do.
And so we're direct to consumer e commerce brand. So Callie's books is sound books for children, anything from 2, 3 months old all the way to about 10, 12 years old.
Please talk to our audience a little bit about the growth that you've experienced and also the challenges.
And that gave us lots of challenges. The first one, of course, on the manufacturing side, like making enough product to be able to reach the United States and ultimately into the consumer's hands. But very quickly, even with a lot of inventory, we would weren't able to get it fast enough to Amazon. And in particular we were reaching FBA limits which were getting us into situations where we only had two or three weeks worth of inventory at Amazon. And of course from a growth perspective, you're ending up with constant stock outs and this sort of sawtooth growth where you step up and then you stop and then you step up and it just very expensive to keep going. And we really needed to get out of that model. Hence the partnership. The great thing about working with Kahoot and the reason why we really partnered is that we're across the board from our own website through Amazon, fba, Amazon seller fulfilled prime, through to small retailers and even some large retailers like Nordstrom or Coles. And we really wanted a partner that could help us across the board and that's why we were talking to the nation and that's how we ended up joining Kahoot last year.
What are other aspects of the Kahoot service that you've had experience with?
So we've had experience with customer service from, you know, even yourself or Jeremy, our excellence manager and your team as well. I think the thing that stands out is that everybody understands what we're doing and they understand it from the tech side, from the fulfillment side down to what it means to actually pick and pack. And so we don't have long conversations with people in order to just understand the problem and then as a result it gets solved a lot quicker.
How do you feel as you partner with Kahoot? With Kahoot's ability to continue serving, as you continue to explode, your growth continues to accelerate.
Yeah, so we've had very few issues on the B2C front. I think after setting up, the flow is very smooth and we've noticed that that is the case at our volume, regardless of peak or a very slow Sunday. I think we're where we'll keep working together is just integrating more and more platforms and especially getting good at doing the very custom requirement that the very large retailers have, which the customer service obviously is key for us to be able to align on. How are we going to meet these sometimes crazy requirements.
So in terms of order defect or fulfillment related defect, any challenges, any issues, generally speaking, that you've had in the course that we've been working together.
So as I was mentioning just earlier, I was struggling to find even a handful of orders that we've had serious issues with. The only ones I can remember were address validation, typical things like that, or carrier didn't fulfill at the end. Otherwise I can't even remember a single order that was shipped out later.
Any parting thoughts? Advice to other sellers, other brands that.
Are so from our perspective, we really believe in doing it ourselves first to understand the problem and if you can, try to do it yourself first and then if you also, if you can try and work with as few partners as possible, it really makes your life easier. And that was key to, you know, us being able to not have to worry about fulfillment in 2020.
