How QUICKPLAY Sport cut shipment costs by 50% using Cahoot

Foreign.

My name is Manish Chaudhary. I'm the founder and CEO of Kahoot. I'm here happy to welcome Alan Holland from Quick Placebo. Allan, please, for our audience, if you would introduce yourself and your company.

Yeah, my name is Alan Holland. I'm CEO of Quick Place 4. We are a predominantly DCC retailer of sports equipment, soccer goals, rebounders, other training equipment. We sell predominantly on Amazon and on our website. So we started the company originally probably 2007ish in the UK. That's where I'm from. And we sold there for a number of years and then launched it there us in roughly 2014 ish. We sell predominantly on Amazon and then also on our own website and, and we do actually sell to some regions. We see very strong demand over here in the U.S. specifically soccer, which is our main sport. We do have other sports equipment as well, but soccer is our main sport, main bread and butter. And we, we've seen significant strong growth in line with the growth of the spot over here in the U.S. so it's becoming, you know, grows in participation every single year and we're seeing benefits from that. So we store our stock, have. Have been storing our stock in Amazon's FBA warehouses around the country and then we were utilizing a 3PL on the east coast and on west coast of the US and we were finding, we were having growing pains with the distribution setup that we had. It was very costly to move our stock around the country via LTL shipments to Amazon's warehouses. And we were finding the biggest issue we were finding is that for our DTC business, shipping directly out about VPL at the time was very costly. The rates that they had for small parcel delivery were very high. For our size of production, we sell sock goals and the like. So they're big, bulky packages. And we were finding the rates that we were getting charged by UPS were very high and couldn't absorb those ourselves. Didn't want to necessarily pass them on to the customer. And so we felt that the best option for us as we were seeing strong growth on our website was that you need to commit to finding a fulfillment partner that could place our stock closer to our customers and also provide better shipping rates. Sure. Yeah. So you're right. At the three pl we're working with, they were small mom and pop operation. They're a decent sized 3 PL. I think what the disconnect was that the, a lot of the, A lot of their customers dealt with small and light. So they had very good small and light rates. But Our packages were, you know, they're quite large and bulky. Some of them can be over the, over the length, the weight threshold that some of the carriers have, incurring significant surcharges, that sort of thing. So I think they just weren't, because we were their own, one of their, probably one of the fewer, the fewer customers who did bulky shipments, they weren't necessarily able to negotiate great rates for us on our, on our behalf. And so we explored to start with actually opening an account directly with UPS ourselves, the shippers ourselves, we didn't find that there was really any overall rate savings there. We then went on a procurement process where we started looking at various different three PLs. And again, a lot of threeplate PLs that we found they tend to have their sweet spot. They either want to deal with certain customer who has a certain board volume or has a certain size of package that they, that they typically ship out. And we found for one reason or another that they, they felt we weren't a fit for them or we felt they weren't a fit for us. And so I think we reviewed maybe 5 to 103 PL providers. Some of them were significantly larger and but yeah, they were, they were wanting clients who, you know, get upwards of, you know, multiple tens of thousands of orders per month. And then yeah, we looked at some of the smaller ones too. But as I say, they, they were, they were, for the most part we found just there wasn't a really good fit for, and came across Kahoot because actually Kahoot were integrating with our order management system and had an integration already. And that was one of our requirements because we know having onboarded with the three PL before, how difficult it can be to get the API for the order management system hooked up to the 3 PL. So we thought we would check with, essentially start our search with the providers, the logistics and delivery providers who already had integrations with existing lms. And that's actually how we found Kahoot. As we looked into the way that the business set up, we noticed it was kind of something different. It was a lot more akin to the Amazon FBA model where stock gets placed much closer to our customers. And we're not limited by locations of say, a specific 3 PL having 12 locations around the country. You have to hold your stock there. It seemed that there was some very benefits to be had by essentially using fulfillment centers that are actually close to our customers and the savings that you get, get from, especially with the parcel delivery. There's definitely a, quite a, quite a big difference between the two that with some of the three PLs we were inquiring with, you go through the very standard sales process where you fill out a, you know, one or two page form that they, that they've prepared, prepared that kind of, you just list, you know, various things like, you know, average orders, the size of your packages, that sort of thing. And some of those would progress then on to a phone call to determine if some of them would have some of them. We just received emails back going, sorry guys, you're just unfit for us. And no real explanation why. And that was pretty much what we were used to from a 3 PL process. Certainly similar process to we went through for our last three pl with Kahoot. We were, we were surprised pleasantly that the depth that Kahoot kind of goes into in order to analyze our business and figure out exactly where our customers are and where is where, where is where it's best to place our stock and savings gain from that. I think that was a really refreshing process that went through, believed about 12 months worth of raw data and gave us essentially a breakdown report exactly where our customers were in different states and suggesting exactly where we would hold our stock and the savings that would present to us over our existing three pl. Yeah, sure. I think we didn't really have too much anxiety ourselves about sharing our order data. We share our data with a lot of different organizations, be it our inventory management system that plugs into Amazon. There's a bunch of other apps, for example, that plug into our Amazon Shopify that have full visibility on what, you know, how we operate as a business. And so it seemed actually like a very refreshing approach to, for us to, you know, put our cards on the table and to say, provide the data to exactly where our, where our orders were, where they were to get down to the level of detail, exactly the most common packages, them shipped to different locations, that sort of thing. That was actually quite intriguing for us. And the fact that Kahoot was so engaged to go through that process actually I think put our minds at ease more than anything, to be honest. So yeah, I think it was, say it was kind of refreshing in that regard that it wasn't just a one sheet of paper. Fill it in then. Here's your quote, take it or leave it. It was very much a hand holding process where we had, you know, multiple, multiple calls where we talked through the data and there was a back and forth, you know, between the Kahoot team and ours when there were queries about bits of the data which needed explaining or missing. And I think yeah, the end result was that we came out of the scoping process with a lot of confidence in Kahoot, that they were a good partner for us. Very pleasantly surprised. We've actually been through scoping processes with various providers before and I think, yeah, Kahoot have been one of the few that has not over promised and underdelivered. For example, we, without naming names, onboarded with an ERP system a year or so ago and they had a similarly excellent sales process and did a lot of work to investigate into our business exactly where they could find, where they could make improvements. But then they completely fell on the actual implementation and the launch and we ended up parting ways with them. So that left a bad taste in our mouth. And so we, I suppose there was some apprehension because fulfillment is the linchpin of our business. If we can't ship our goods to customers, then, you know, we can't actually exist as a business. So it's definitely a. We were expect. We weren't expecting ku's implementation to be as good as it was. The demo was obviously very good, the platform looked great. But when we actually started working with the crew, we just were continually surprised with firstly how engaged the Kahoot team is. We have regular contact with Jeremy, who is always, pretty much always there on hand to be able to answer our questions and to solve issues we've had. The actual Kahoot platform itself is very clean. It works, it has some great features in it that enable us to operate in a very easy and well documented manner. And I think just, yeah, throughout the entire onboarding process, as we started moving stock into Kahoot and started selling through it, it's continued to surprise us pleasantly. To answer your question in the first place, was the actual promises that were made in the scoping process with regard to savings and the roi. When you see, I feel that they continually keep watch of the numbers and they continue to essentially meet what was promised. Average cost of shipping, unit of stock has almost halved, you know, which is fantastic because shipping for us is pretty much the one of the largest line items in the P and L. So that that on its own has been, you know, a massive. The transition has been relatively seamless. We started by shipping in few uploads around just before Christmas, doing holiday sales. We were very impressed with how quickly Kahoot received that stock and started turning it around and shipping it out again, especially at that time of year, obviously because it's extremely high demand time of year for any fulfillment provider. So to be able to accommodate us at that time of year Was, was great. And yeah, we found, we found that was. That was very easy. At the same time we were essentially rerouted inbound containers to Kahoot's warehouses. And that has also been relatively painless for us. And then over. We would ideally like to have probably moved a little bit faster but just the cost of actual ltl inland trucking at the moment, just being what it is, would make it cost prohibitive for us to move all of our stock from the existing three plus hundreds of pallets, that sort of thing to warehouses. And so we kind of slow rolled the transition a little bit more in sense of selling through the existing stock that we had and our three pl and just moving. Yeah, moving our new containers plus some key lines into Kahoot's warehouses. And then as far as the actual, you know, dispatch and actual how we found the actual shipment of goods order, order processing, it's. It's just, yeah, it's very seamless. It works, it works very well. The platform is very clean, easy to understand. The. I, yeah, we're. I don't keep a super close eye on it, but I'm aware that our customers are getting their shipments so you know, within give or take about two, three days. And as we continue our onboarding and continue to spread our stock more evenly and we're personally using Billy's three different fulfillments I'm taking as we spread our stock more easily around those, we know that we're probably going to get down to that one to two day kind of golden number for shipping goods arrivals while around stock for our customers. So. So yeah, it's very encouraging that previously we were telling customers that five to seven business days are the best we can do. So it's quite a big, quite a big towel around for us. My advice would be, yeah, have a little faith in the, in the process. The actual, the onboarding and the sales process that you go through with Kahoot is thorough. You know, you end up with a very clear idea of the benefits that Kahoot could bring. Funnily enough, if anything, it almost felt too good to be true. Which is. And that's. That actually gives you pause because you go could these. I don't know is this actually, this actually, you know, true that we could may be making these savings on small parcels and you know, on the bottom line. And yeah, so we, I think if anything, yeah, it's obviously worked out that way and continues to show that it's been very beneficial for our business and I have a lot of confidence in cuckoo team your ability to grow and bring on new customers. So yeah, keep at it. I think at this present time we probably give you guys a 10. You might have gathered that by the my answers but yeah, we're very confident we made the right decision and yeah, we hope you guys continue to deliver on that 10.

Well you're setting the bar really high for us so we have to continuously try and this is a journey. This is not a one time thing. And Alan, thank you so much for your time and for working with us and we are absolutely delighted and we are so blessed that we get to participate in your growth and we can't. I mean the sport of soccer is growing around the world, especially in America. So I know that you're on to great things and we are so glad to be part of your journey.

Yeah, that's great. Thank you. And yeah, we're pleased to have you along.