Farmhouse Pottery Case Study

Overview

Farmhouse Pottery, established in 2012, creates handcrafted pottery and supplements its offerings with items in home and garden décor, wood and glass ! products, enamelware, and cookware, among many others. The company has two retail locations in Woodstock, VT and Hanover, NH with the single manufacturing studio at the Woodstock flagship location.

Industry
Home Decor

ERP
NetSuite

Website
www.farmhousepottery.com

Farmhouse Pottery sells its products via in-store retail, eCommerce and B2B in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The company has nine dropship partnerships with companies including Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, and Zola. Most products are shipped via parcel, ! but due to order demand, Farmhouse Pottery is also shipping a small but increasing number of LTL shipments.

Benefits & Key Outcomes

Improved planning

Gained visibility and

Ability to grow without
adding headcount

and scheduling

metrics of packing and

shipping operations

Challenge

During the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shutdown, Farmhouse Pottery worked creatively to meet customer demand for its handmade products as it faced a significant increase in customer orders. “Our distribution was growing rapidly and we needed solutions to successfully grow and scale our operations,” said Kim Gaines, Operations Manager at Farmhouse Pottery.

Consideration for Farmhouse Pottery was being able to rate shop and find the best carrier for each product and shipment, at the right time, in the right sized box. As most of its products are extremely fragile and each shipment has a unique size and weight,

Case Study:

FARMHOUSE POTTERY

Solution

“It’s not often that you instantly feel like it’s the right solution, at the right time, with the right partner,” said Gaines. “That’s what happened when Farmhouse Pottery met ShipHawk. Everything about it seemed to be the right fit for us.”

By implementing ShipHawk’s fulfillment solution for NetSuite, Farmhouse Pottery has gained the visibility and data it needs to track shipments and scale operations. “It was important, when we invested in NetSuite, that any tool or solution we use integrate with NetSuite,” said Gaines. “The fact that ShipHawk is integrated and built into the functionality of our day-to-day operations was ! a no brainer for us.”

Using ShipHawk’s rate shopping feature, Farmhouse Pottery can easily identify the best carrier and service level for each unique shipment. “Our carriers have embraced our relationship with ShipHawk, giving us visibility into all the rates available to us to meet customer expectations,” said Gaines.

Farmhouse Pottery now updates and syncs shipment details, whether that be domestic and international parcel or LTL from ShipHawk into NetSuite. With each shipment, the information written back to NetSuite helps streamline the process of notifying customers in Shopify, its eCommerce shopping cart, with accurate details related to their shipment while keeping Farmhouse Pottery’s system of record up to date.

One of the biggest operational benefits that ShipHawk has enabled for me is seeing how my
“
packers are doing, how quickly they’re putting our fragile products into boxes and getting
those boxes out the door.

Scalability is essential for Farmhouse Pottery, located in a rural area, with a small team. The team needs to continue to grow and scale to meet increasing customer demand using technology to help move the needle forward. "Without the level of data we're getting from ShipHawk, it would be harder to schedule, plan, and scale our operations, especially as we head into our busy season," said Gaines.