Overview
J. Stockard Fly Fishing is a second-generation, family-run supplier of fly-tying materials. Charles Vick, President, is the son of the founders. His parents started the company almost twenty-five years ago, when buying hooks, feathers, and thread online still needed explaining. Today, they remain one of the bigger specialists in a tiny niche: serious fly fishers who tie their own flies.
The assortment is the whole game. About 18,000 SKUs across roughly 50 vendors and 120 brands. Around 2,000 Shopify products, nearly 10 variants each. Average unit price sits around $7-8. Average order is about $70, so baskets look like a trip to Michaels: ten line items, often more. All of it lives in a warehouse Crystal Dubray, Operations Manager, calls about 2,500-2,800 square feet, and what Charles describes as a nice two-bedroom apartment, holding roughly 150,000 units.
That is a lean operation by design. One company. One location. No drop ship. Everything physically receives and ships through the same floor. Crystal has been Operations Manager for twenty-two years and was employee number one. The team still runs with four pullers, packers, and shippers.
In 2022, they did a big upgrade: Shopify on the front end, NetSuite on the back. Charles had worked in large companies with ERPs and knew the benefit an ERP could provide, but what they got was the wrong-sized tool. Two years ago, they moved to Fulfil and haven't looked back.
"While our product assortment is big and complicated, in many ways our business is pretty simple. We didn't need a lot of the stuff NetSuite had, and of course, it's very expensive."
- Charles Vick, President
The Challenge: NetSuite Was Overkill for a One-Warehouse Brand
Location-based picking and real WMS capability were why they looked at Fulfil. On NetSuite, those asks turned into modules and quotes.
"Anytime you want to add a warehouse management feature, they're like, yeah, we can do that. Do you have fifty thousand dollars?"
- Charles Vick, President
Crystal saw order volumes spike from the floor. She used to walk packages to the post office. Now they see 150-200 orders a day on average and 250-300 in their January peak, with large line-item baskets. NetSuite was not enough to keep pace.
"Fulfil has definitely improved the warehouse. We wouldn't be able to keep up without Fulfil. Even in NetSuite, we wouldn't be able to keep up with the orders the way they were."
- Crystal Dubray, Operations Manager
See related: Fulfil vs. NetSuite
How J. Stockard Runs Fulfil: Location Picking First, Then Claude
Batching and location picks
Crystal used to spend a long time creating batches, given the high number of line items in a typical order. With Fulfil's Warehouse Management System, the warehouse can operate much faster and adjust batches as needed during peak season.
"The batching has definitely helped. We've finally mastered how we want our batches done, and when we get busy, I can tweak it a little to speed up the warehouse."
- Crystal Dubray, Operations Manager
Binning 18,000 SKUs used to take work. With Fulfil's bin-level inventory management, each puller on the team has saved several hours a day.
Charles puts the strategic win on location-based picking that NetSuite would have sold as another module.
"Fulfil has allowed us to use location-based picking. We set up our warehouse with locations, which older systems either didn't enable or, if you wanted to enable them, it was a whole other module and another fifty grand."
- Charles Vick, President
See related: Warehouse Bin Location Label Generator
Training that used to take years
Most pickers have been there for years. One recently retired after nearly fifteen. Five years ago, a new hire needed two or three years to ramp up to the picking speed of experienced hires to know where all 18,000 SKUs were stored. Last busy season, a seasonal hire came on, stayed full-time, and Crystal expects him to match the fastest pullers this winter.
"For someone to be able to navigate the warehouse and the tools of location-based picking, allowing someone to get up to speed that quickly is revolutionary for us."
- Charles Vick, President
Temps are usable now. Before, you had to hire a year early just to get a little help.
"We can hire temps that we don't have to explain much to. Before there was just like, there's no way, we'd have to hire somebody a year in advance just to get them to be able to pick a little."
- Crystal Dubray, Operations Manager
Invoice chaos to Claude Code ticketing
The receiving team, Crystal, the bookkeeper, and Charles used to chase mismatched invoices over email with dozens of receipts a week. When price, quantity, or totals drifted from the draft invoice in Fulfil, threads multiplied, owners blurred, and prioritization died.
"It was taking as much time to keep it all straight in our heads as it was to actually solve the problem. With the help of Claude Code, I basically built an internal ticketing system for invoices that turns every invoice into a ticket with a single owner at any given time."
- Charles Vick, President
The same build pulls PDFs from the purchasing inbox via API, compares them to attachments on POs in Fulfil, and flags invoices that never got assigned. Fewer buried PDFs. Clear ownership.
"That alone has probably saved us four to six hours a week across the team of not needing to dig through emails."
- Charles Vick, President
Five hundred PO lines, five minutes in Claude
Big supplier POs can run a few hundred lines. A draft invoice off by three percent used to mean a manual line-by-line hunt.
"Now I just throw it into Claude. Here's the invoice. Tell me what the differences are. Within five minutes, it's like, okay, this is where you made the mistake. Finding little things like that in a 500 line purchase order is a lifesaver."
- Crystal Dubray, Operations Manager
See related: Fulfil MCP
Crystal Dubray's micro apps: WMS dashboard, Reorder Radar, thank-you merge
Crystal started shipping micro apps after watching Fulfil's micro app webinars.
WMS performance dashboard. She liked Fulfil's WMS v2 dashboard, then rebuilt it with Claude to monitor items picked and packages shipped per hour, compare days, and show pullers their own improvement.
Open PO cleanup. A micro app surfaces how many days a PO has been open and percent fulfilled. It caught skipped closes on vendors that do not keep backorders. Crystal cleaned about sixty open POs in a week and cut new POs before busy season.
Reorder Radar. Crystal owns purchasing. Instead of scrolling purchase requests blind, Reorder Radar shows how many products they buy from a vendor, percent out of stock, and urgency. A three-SKU scissors vendor with one stockout is a third of the line for that supplier, but may have been missed previously relative to other vendors.
"It puts it on a radar so that I can save time thinking about what to order and things don't get skipped."
- Crystal Dubray, Operations Manager
See related: Grunt Style on building micro apps with Fulfil and Claude
The Impact: Lean Warehouse, Faster People, Claude on the Boring Work
Hours a day back to each puller
Location picks and tuned batching took hours per day off each puller in a warehouse that still fits in a couple of thousand square feet.
A seasonal workforce that can actually help
Ramp time collapsed from two or three years to a season. Temps can take load off without a year of tribal training. That is how a lean headcount survives January at 250-300 orders a day.
4-6 hours a week off invoice email, more in peak
Ticketing, unassigned-PDF detection, and Claude line diffs moved AP investigation from inbox archaeology to owned tickets and five-minute diagnoses. Peak receiving no longer burns a day a week across four people.
Looking Forward: Stay Lean, Keep Building
J. Stockard is still growing inside the same niche and the same compact warehouse. Crystal is still finding time savings two years into using Fulfil.
"Hopefully it comes across that we are pretty satisfied customers."
- Charles Vick, President
