Melissa Nick started a new role at ShipBob last month but she didn’t leave the customer obsession she learned at Amazon far behind.
With 70 percent revenue growth and more than 100 million orders shipped through its network, ShipBob will double down on inventory placement under Nick, the omnichannel fulfillment platform’s first chief supply chain officer.
Although it has 50 fulfillment centers worldwide, Nick said the company’s evolving inventory placement program enables brands to send their product to one of four primary hubs in Chicago, Moreno Valley, Calif., Kutztown, Pa. and Grapevine, Texas, and the fulfillment provider will take care of the rest. When an order is placed, ShipBob’s algorithm automatically selects the warehouse and carrier that will give the quickest turnaround based on the company’s “demand profile,” which identifies where individual products are selling best.
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ShipBob aims to be the go-to provider for outsourced shipping and fulfillment for omnichannel brands of all sizes. The company is “uber-obsessed with SMBs and how we can set them up to win, whatever that may look like,” Nick told Sourcing Journal. The company offers its own proprietary warehouse management system (WMS) for those who want to keep fulfillment in-house.
In the role, Nick will oversee the end-to-end design and execution of ShipBob’s supply chain and logistics infrastructure for both their fulfillment network and customers managing their own fulfillment with ShipBob’s WMS, from the time inventory leaves the manufacturer’s factory floor until it arrives the shopper’s doorstep.
While Amazon keeps its own brand front and center for its third-party merchants, Nick wants ShipBob to take a more brand-friendly route that offers a customizable feel for its merchants during the packaging and unboxing process. The firm’s customization suite offers branded packaging, marketing inserts and even gift notes.
“If you receive something that shipped through ShipBob on behalf of one of our merchants, it can show up on your porch in a custom box with custom packaging inserts, or kitting, so they can merge and bundle products together into one shipment,” said Nick. “It’s that unboxing experience which is really important to our merchants to provide a great experience to their end customer.”
The focus on brand is important to ShipBob, especially when companies are outsourcing and looking to optimize costs, Nick said.
“Brands don’t want to invest resources into figuring out logistics and learning logistics,” Nick told Sourcing Journal. “They want to invest resources in product development and brand and marketing and all of those things that are helping them get their products out there.”
Nick spent more than nine years at Amazon, most recently serving as its vice president of North America, customer fulfillment, where she led operations, planning and engineering teams across more than 250 fulfillment centers and just under 600,000 hourly employees.
The role at ShipBob covers less physical ground given its smaller warehouse footprint, but the task at her new company is a global endeavor as ShipBob operates hubs in Australia, the U.K., Poland and the Netherlands. Nick says the company can ship most items in two days.
“It’s a different scale, obviously,” Nick said. “But what you learned through that scale is that it’s all about creating a process than can be replicated easily.” ShipBob expects to add new U.S. fulfillment centers, but Nick didn’t disclose details.
Scaling a business isn’t new to Nick. Prior to overseeing North America fulfillment, Melissa helped build AMXL, Amazon’s global extra-large fulfillment and delivery service, from the ground up.
In an era when brands are still trying to offload excess inventory that piled up last year, the company wants to give them more alternatives.
“There’s a lot of talk about brands having too much inventory, and a big focus for us has been unlocking additional sales channels for our customers,” Casey Armstrong, chief marketing officer at ShipBob, told Sourcing Journal. “They can come to us and expand however they want to sell, whether that’s in the U.S. or around the world, whether that’s direct-to-consumer or through retail partners or through different marketplaces.”
In one such recent example, ShipBob itself is an Amazon partner. It launched a Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) Prep Automation service last October that can help prepare and send ShipBob merchants’ FBA inventory to Amazon for faster placement, allowing them to use ShipBob as their centralized inventory hub.
As brands continue selling off excess goods, Nick observed that the supply chain has returned to 2019 levels in terms of flow and predictability.
“This year, we’ve seen a lot of recovery in the overall supply chain. Lead times have come back to almost pre-Covid conditions,” Nick said. “Purchase order fulfillment is near the level of standard consistency that we had pre-Covid as well.”
