How Cut.com scaled order fulfillment with zero disruption using Cahoot

Foreign. I go in and I check the dashboard every. Every day or so just to see if there's anything that needs attention. And it's just nice to see a big list of things that have been shipped. And I didn't have to do anything about it. I didn't have to give anybody any. Any kind of reminders or check on something. And so I've appreciated that once it's. Once it's gotten up and running, it just continues to run without. Without issue. Sure. Yeah. I'm David Knockey. I'm the director of product development at Cut, and we are a video company based in Seattle, Washington. And we have an E. Commerce Department, which I had, which sells some of our products that we have made based on our videos. So. So we have a fan base that is buying things from us, and we have a single source of. Or we had a single source of distribution for our E Commerce products, which was Corey's warehouse in Oregon. And they've been a good partner for us for lots of reasons. E Commerce and B2B both. But, you know, we're on the west coast and we have maps and we know that the country is bigger than that. So we were looking for a way to. To retain the relationship that we had with Corey, but also expand our ability to serve customers across the country and the east coast and the Midwest and other places where we see that we have, you know, a larger customer base. So we were really excited to discover that Kahoot, in addition to being a traditional, you know, 3PL provider, is also able to add an adjunct to our existing 3 PL strictly for expanding into different geographical areas and allowing us to serve customers closer to where they live, meaning less travel time for their packages and also less postage cost because it's traveling less distance. So that was. That was really the big key thing that attracted us to Kahoot was the ability to maintain our existing relationship and then just sort of add on to it. So, you know, I, as a person that is responsible for a budget for operations and logistics, I always. I always have my head on a swivel for just making sure that we're getting, you know, we're getting. Taking the best advantage of various services that are always popping up. So I think my recollection was that we had an introductory call where you asked, you know, what is your current situation? And I explained that we ship things from Oregon. And then you came up with the idea that you have a distributed network that can simply add on to that as opposed to raising the question of changing over. We've changed three PLs since I've worked at cut, we've gone through three different providers and then landing on Corey as the third of them and it's. It's a hassle to, to change things over and you don't want to do it unless you have a really good reason. I didn't really have that good of a reason. But again, I'm just trying to keep. Keep my options open and investigate and so when I found something that would allow us to keep the relationships that we had and just sort of add capabilities on top of that, that was really interesting to me. But so I credit you for, for suggesting that it was something that was even possible and then working with us very rapidly, I will say and very, very effectively to, to get that going. And it was the holidays, it was like December that we were talking and so you were able to really get us spun up very quickly.

My name is Corey Cassoni. I'm a co founder and one of the owners here at Crown Studios. We're a creative services company in addition to being a 3 PL. So we, we sort of handle full vertical for a lot of our clients and often we have clients who just need a thing like, like David and Cut. They really just need warehousing. B2B, B2C. You know, we can handle that for them. But we are only based in Oregon so there is that difficulty of getting to Zone 8 and those areas. There are a lot of carriers that provide, you know, flat rate services and that kind of things. But you get into restrictions of box and sizing and this kind of stuff and postage prices are always going up. We actually have some partner warehouses outside of the United States which is not uncommon for a lot of 3pls. But within the US it's harder than you would imagine to find other companies that are willing to work with you that are similarly structured and priced and that kind of stuff. So it was a great catch by David and the Cut crew to sort of find someone else that was willing to integrate with us and it just work easily. It just works, you know. So you know, when he first came to us and said, hey, we think we've got this other fulfillment situation and it's going to be much cheaper from these locations, it wasn't unexpected. I mean we've had that happen before. But what was very interesting was the concept of like, you know, some stuff can go from over here and some stuff can go from over there and we can get these platforms to integrate with one another in such a way where it's not going to screw up the workflow because we have tried in the past to work with multiple 3pls and then my team just becomes kind of middle management. And you know, we really like to be hands on. So it's nice to not have to middle manage the outside spokes that we're not a part of and still be hands on with the pieces that we are a part of. So it's, it's a great, it's been great. It was unexpected to have anybody that was willing to try it. You know, it's not you. It's not a thing you hear a lot of here.

Yeah. Well, I really appreciate how, you know, initially you and then your colleague Jeremy. Um, you know, I've been very communicative, very responsive with any questions that we had. It took me a little bit to kind of really get everything aligned on my end. And you were very patient in answering all of our questions. And since then as we've had questions or things have come up, you know, Jeremy, our account manager has been very responsive. So I feel like there's. Whenever there's something that I, I'm not, I'm unclear about or I just don't know how to do something, you know, I've, I've always felt like I could, I could get the answer pretty easily and things have worked out basically seamlessly. Like the promise of this has always been, okay, you do this, it's going to make your life easier. And I think that's true. I haven't had to manage the shipments in any kind of hands on way, except for the occasional weird case, which is always true. Once I understood exactly what your warehouse would be doing and what Corey's would be doing and what I would have to do once it was clear, you know, the roles that we would each play in this, it's happened pretty consistently and predictably, which is nice. And when there is an issue, I'm able to reach out and get some clarity or some assistance with it. So I really appreciate just the level of service has been, you know, everything you could ask for in terms of having a partner. And I think that, uh, I mean that was definitely true in terms, in, in terms of our setup time. And then, you know, on a day to day basis, you know, I, I go in and I check the dashboard every, every day or so just to see if there's anything that needs attention. And it's just nice to see a big list of things that have been shipped and I didn't have to do anything about it. I Didn't have to give anybody any, any kind of reminders or check on something. And so I, I've appreciated that once it's, once it's gotten up and running, it just continue, continues to run without, without issue written in to say, hey, I got my thing and it was damaged or I got my thing and it was, you know, packed insufficiently and people will complain if that happens. So the, the incidence of that happening has, I mean, has literally been zero. Now, not to say that maybe it can never happen, but it has not been worse or has not been a problem at all. I think the, the other nice thing is we do a lot of, you know, people will order multiple things and it was made very clear to us that there's a, a step in the, in the picking process that involves, you know, barcode verification of the contents of the package. So, you know, that gives me a lot of peace of mind that if somebody orders some weird combination of things that somebody is, you know, there's a system in place to ensure that people are getting the correct thing. And you know, people also will complain if they're good, if they get the wrong thing, for sure. And the instance of that has, has also been, been zero. Well, so the objectives in question, I mean everybody who is in E commerce wants to deliver things cheaper and faster and more reliably like those are. That's just true of everybody. The, the driving incident that made me sort of start googling around was we were having, just for various reasons that are hard to identify, but I think had to do with the distance that packages were having to travel. We were just having a larger than average incidence of customer service of like people who said that there's things were taking too long or things that were, they weren't arriving or they were being misdelivered or whatever the case may be. And every time that happens, you know, we have to reship something and that costs money. So initially it was to just be able to offer service more reliably to more people. And since. And then the cost savings is of course you don't do that. You don't do that if it costs more. You do that if it costs the same or less. And as it turned out, you know, you did the numbers for us and it turns out it would cost, you know, a little bit less. And it's, but really the, the customer service piece of it, the idea that somebody can order a package and get it quickly and get it reliably, you know, if it costs the same, that would be worth it. And what I've noticed since then is that the number of people that have had a customer service inquiry has dropped dramatically. So I'm willing to attribute that, at least in part to what we've been doing from Kahoot. I think that that saves us time and money dealing with reshipments, dealing with CS tickets. So, you know, that's been a net gain for us in terms of the amount of time we have to spend dealing with it and the amount of money we have to spend reshipping packages. So even as I said, even if it was a break even, I think that's, that's an improvement. And as it turned out, it was also a cost savings.

You know, the, the issue that we always have when it comes to partner warehouses, anything that is not just building another warehouse in a different part of the country or in a different country entirely. The, the issue is always the middle. Like, how do I make sure that that warehouse is doing its fulfillment and doing it in the same way and up to the standard that we have. And you know, and to David's point, the further a package has to travel, the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong. And if something goes wrong, then that comes back up the chain and now my team has to deal with it and then that can get backed up and then it just becomes this back and forth of the thing thing. So, you know, the issue is always like, where is somewhere else we can ship through and we trust that it's just going to function without us just becoming permanent middle managers or without me having to hire somebody who does, just does nothing but check all the time. Is this shift, is this going from here? Is it going from the right place? So I think the, the first thing that we had with Kahoot when we started working with you was that ability to just. There's a backend, we log in, it tells us what to ship and then.

We can also see what's shipping from elsewhere.

And I think that works great for David too because he can say to me, hey, can you look at this? This package was supposed to ship from over here and something maybe is a little weird with it. Can you ship it from over there? Or he can talk to Jeremy and say the same thing in reverse. So having having the ability to have two warehouses in different places and for us to be able to just kind of make it function without a lot of hands on interaction, I think that was, that was my biggest concern going in and ended up not being an issue at all. I mean, it just the, the, your, your Back end stuff just works, which is great. You know, if we want to look at like from a 60,000foot future perspective for me as a three plus having opportunity to work with additional clients, you know, on top of cut. And this is something that you've, you've brought up with me and we haven't really explored, but it's like, yeah, you know, I have, I have a warehouse, I have space. Is there someone like David but on the east coast who's having the same problem in reverse? You know, they're going like, how do I get to the west coast? This is terrible. And you know, there, there are potentially opportunities there, but just with respect to David and cut, it's the amount of people hours that had to go into dealing with a package that didn't get to where it needed to get to simply because it was going to a zone 7 or a zone 8. And you know, in terms of like shipping, when you're talking about zones distance from here, you're looking at the longest possible track it can take without leaving the country. And that may not seem like a big deal if you live in France or the uk, where the whole country is the size of one of our states. But when you're in the, in the west especially and you've got an incredible amount of distance to cover before you get anywhere near the eastern seaboard and then once it gets to there, it's got to go to a local hub, then it's got to get sorted again, then it's got to go to somewhere. I mean, cutting a thousand or fifteen hundred miles out of that trip, you're, you're shaving two, three days off plus the opportunity for it to get lost. And then for me that means my team doesn't have to deal with the CS and David doesn't have to deal with the cs. And I think there's been a precipitous drop in customer service issues since we started doing this for a variety of reasons, but probably the biggest one being when you can get stuff delivered in two to three days because you're only ever shipping as far as Zone 3. It. The chances for failure go way down.

Yeah, well, I mean in our case, our case is, is definitely specific because the fact that we are using Kahoot in the way that we are, which is as an adjunct, like, you know, I would, I was very leery at, you know, anything that would require us to sort of undo something that was working well. And you know, I only want to make a big move if I, I'm confident that it's going to be something that's going to be advantageous for, for my goals and for my business. And so I, in my recollection is that the attitude that, that your team took was like, let's just try it a little bit and then we can unwind anything that if it doesn't work, you're still where you are. You're not, you know, you're not committing to anything that is, you can't stop doing because you're not leaving your existing relationships. You're just adding capabilities on top of your existing relationships. And then if it sucks, then, you know, then you don't have to do it anymore. And that seems like a very reasonable thing to risk for me. And as it turned out, it didn't suck. So yeah, I think that flexibility, the willingness to be accommodating of what our sort of concerns and business priorities were, which is to say we can't disrupt what we're doing. We can't do things that are going to cause new problems that we don't have now. It has to only solve problems and not cause problems problems. You know, I think that was, that was a nice, it was nice that that was how it worked. People were willing to be very helpful and we got everything set up and we had no hiccups that were not easily solved. So you know, that's, that's the kind of thing you want every service to be a thing that helps you and doesn't make new problems and ends up being better than you are. I mean, there's definitely other, other fulfillment services out there that use distributed networks, right? And then depending on who you talk to, that's either idea or a terrible idea when it comes to inventory management. Like obviously distributed networks are, you know, can be very complicated. And in there was nobody that we found that was willing to work with our existing service. There's definitely people who said like, we'll take it over for you and you know, become your fulfillment, you know, network. And again, that was a, there was a leap I had no need to take and nor was I willing to, to risk. So yeah, the idea of, and my understanding of how Kahoot works is like it's people like Corey, it's people with other small businesses, you know, located around that are interested in doing good work and interested in, you know, a higher level of service. So I, I really got the feeling that it was a sort of a hand picked network of people that were reliable as opposed to simply another warehouse full of people who just were interested in scale, more than interested in a high level of service.