How Jennifer Zeuner Jewelry Cut Personalized Order Production Time by 30%

I'm Joseph Zeuner, son of Jennifer Zeuner, and I work with the business for the past around 6 years, really supporting the e-commerce channel and operations across e-commerce, wholesale, drop ship, and then working on special projects, larger commercial projects like highlights on QVC and the Today Show, FabFitFun boxes. Jennifer Zeuner operates in lots of different channels. We have our online business that's powered by Shopify. We sell in big box retailers, Bloomingdale's, Shopbop, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Saks, and then lots of specialty boutique retailers throughout the United States, as well as through Faire, the online wholesale marketplace. And we do occasional popups and different events using Shopify POS. Before Fulfil, the business was growing year over year. We didn't have a core operating system. We switched from Magento to Shopify in around 2018, which was a big step forward. And then we used Trade Gecko for a few years, which no longer exists. We had a lot of different challenges. The key challenge was really around personalization. Personalized jewelry. So a lot of our jewelry is custom where you can order your name, initials, customize the different symbols on the jewelry. And we were trying to find a system that could help us manage that process in a streamlined, automated way where from the moment a customer placed their order on our website with their personalization all the way to getting that personalization to a supplier or multiple suppliers, it was automated. We really found after scoping a few different softwares, we went through a failed implementation with a jewelry-specific software. It's a much smaller software, much smaller team, and the Shopify integration just wasn't strong. All of the integrations were being done via EDI, which works for some businesses, but really API integrations for a lot of these channels are often a lot stronger, faster, more reliable inventory syncs. And we just found that the software didn't meet our needs. The integrations weren't great, and it just wasn't a scalable system. It seemed like it'd be adding more work, not taking away work. We used to have all our inventory in one physical warehouse. We had our wholesale inventory separate from our drop ship inventory separate from our e-commerce inventory because the channels were different. The inventory syncs were different. Our wholesale partners wanted to have access to inventory that's often at higher volumes and more specific SKUs. Our drop ship inventory we were syncing manually. So we kept that separate and then we did daily and weekly updates to inventory in the different drop ship systems. And then for e-commerce we had to keep it separate to not oversell. When we switched to Fulfil, we combined all of the inventory into one warehouse. And we used different rules in Fulfil to hold back inventory to different channels, to make inventory available in different channels. And that was a major time saver. It increased inventory accuracy because we didn't have the same SKU living in the same warehouse but in three or four different virtual warehouses. It also allowed us to be more flexible with the inventory that we held on hand because we could have the same inventory available on the website and drop ship and not need to overstock so we had availability on different channels. And then our personalized jewelry, with all of the automations that we put in place and just the streamlining, we were able to take the production time down significantly. I think it was over 30%. We shortened the production time for the personalized jewelry just due to the scanning and the automations and the Google Sheets that were just all automated and all of our suppliers had visibility. I think we went down in employees when we implemented Fulfil. Our goal was really to automate, streamline, remove manual work, not add to the work. We looked at Skubana. We looked at Cin7. And what we found was the Fulfil team was really willing to work with us. The Fulfil team was a partner. And something that still to this day with Fulfil is that your team really helped us improve our processes, systems, and workflows. It wasn't just a software that we were buying. It was how are we going to improve our financial accuracy? How are we going to track month-end close? How are we going to take jewelry through multi-step production where it's going from Florida to New York to overseas and back? Really minimizing the cost, streamlining those processes. And then also the personalization piece was huge. Every time I've looked at other ERPs, pulling in the metadata of Shopify products is not something that many systems do, or they want to charge high custom fees for, or you have to do yourself via the API. And with Fulfil, it's just built into the Shopify settings. We were able to with Fulfil run multi-channel inventory, integrate all of our different channels into one place. We manage drop ship automatically. I've worked with at Jennifer Zeuner and with other brands many different ERPs, and the Shopify integration on Fulfil just doesn't compare. I would say that the ease of setup, the sync, the timing, also the constant updates every month. Fulfil is updating, doing product updates, keeping up with where Shopify is at, the new API calls, etc. And just the way that the integration works. I work with an ERP where inventory was updated once a night at 4 a.m. between Shopify retail and different channels and that was the only inventory sync available. So just the complexity but also the simplicity on the back end. You can go in, you can make changes, you can test things, you can have a test store, a production store. We did a partnership with Good Morning America where we had a very high volume in a very short time on a Shopify store and we were able to just link the Good Morning America Shopify store with Fulfil and it was very easy. So I think the Shopify integration is really strong and over time just more and more integrations keep coming out. I've been using the Fulfil MCP and Claude, which I just don't think other ERPs are doing at the pace that's happening right now. The DSCO integration just works. Something that's key with drop ship orders and these partners like Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus is that there's a tedious invoicing process that happens where every single order needs to be invoiced. And if you're not invoicing the orders properly with the right fields and reference numbers and in the right time frame, then you're not getting paid out for those orders quickly. Before Fulfil, we were manually invoicing every single order in the DSCO system. And with the Fulfil integration, those invoices just happen automatically. So all of the fields are being properly filled out automatically. They're being invoiced immediately when they ship and it leads to faster payouts from the different wholesale partners, which was a big win for us. The Fulfil team, especially when we were getting started, I didn't see the support team as a support team. They were really helping us implement the software but also refining our business processes and workflows. It's really about how should a modern DTC brand running multiple channels with complex inventory workflows work and optimize workflows and save time. Really spending the time working through things, getting on Zooms. The team has come in person to our warehouse in Florida before. These are all things that are being done proactively. Our success manager, the support team, shout out to Justin who has been at Fulfil for a long time and is a support, product, operations guru and really is dedicated to our success as a merchant and I'm sure many other merchants' success. They're really just dedicated to the success of the business. When you compare Luminous and Fulfil, the systems just aren't comparable. The integrations weren't comparable. The product management wasn't comparable. The support team, just across the board. The UX and UI, Fulfil has done a lot of work in the past five years. I've really seen the software almost grow up in a way and really have excellent UX and UI. The reporting has been built out much more. It just felt like Luminous was years behind when it came to the UX, the UI, the way the data is managed, the linking of records. I would say that the way that data is structured in Fulfil is extremely thought out. Products, invoices, sales orders, shipments, warehouses, everything is a data record in Fulfil. And it's extremely helpful to keep things extremely clean and have clean, accurate data. When we first switched to Fulfil, we had put in place a report around our sales commissions to our sales reps. And that was something that used to take our accountant multiple reports and reconciling and VLOOKUPs to get to the right report of what sales reps are supposed to get paid. And that was something that became super simple when we switched to Fulfil. Also tracking a lot of our e-commerce orders. It's not typical where you place an order and it's being shipped out in the next day or two. With these personalized lead times, orders can take a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks to ship. And it used to be a really cumbersome process to track when orders are delayed, if orders are not shipping on time. And now it's very easy. We have very straightforward, simple processes where we're tracking orders. If an order is projected to be delayed, we're reaching out to that customer before it's delayed to give them that proactive notice. All of that reporting has been super easy in Fulfil. The way the AI is being built into the system is really smart. The natural search in a few different places in the software now, in product search you can just type naturally with natural search terms and then you're getting results based on your data in the system. Where before and in a typical system you have to type exact words, type exact types of filters. So that's been a nice quality of life improvement. The Claude integration makes it really easy to talk with your data in Fulfil, send actions back into Fulfil. I've done a lot in different WMSs, working in ShipStation, working with 3PL WMSs, working in WMSs that are terminal-based. The Fulfil WMS is just so simple and so easy. The automations around scanning products, scanning labels, the way that shipping labels print automatically, that you can set up stations and just have everything happening automatically and really only using a scanner, is really awesome and just so different from most WMSs that I've used. It just allows for a high volume of orders to be shipped. Someone with maybe limited technical knowledge, or if we're increasing staffing to have more people working in the warehouse, you can just use it really easily, get caught up really easily, and all of the scanning allows for really minimal error. We have probably thousands of SKUs in our warehouse at any given time. A lot of our jewelry can look similar, and we've really minimized the amount of error just using the WMS and all the scanning functionality. And the system scales up and down with where the business is at and what our needs are. If we have an order for thousands of units, it can handle it the same way that it handles an e-commerce order for one or two units. Our team is really able to use the system to just scale up and down as needed. The processes don't change much depending on how many units are being produced or manufactured or ordered. It's really easy for the team to scale up as needed for larger orders and then also manage day-to-day operations of the online business, the wholesale channels, the drop ship. It's just really flexible. There's this question in any e-commerce business, any direct-to-consumer business: what is your point of truth? Where are you running your reporting, your financials, your business metrics? That ends up going into your taxes. What is that point of truth? Well, Shopify is a great point of truth for businesses with one channel. Very few businesses these days are one channel. And in Jennifer Zeuner's case with Fulfil, where you have Shopify, you have multiple different drop ship channels, you have over 100 specialty retail stores, you have your big box stores, you have EDI, you have Faire, the channels these days are endless. The ChatGPT channels are coming soon. With all of these channels, Fulfil just makes it super straightforward to manage them, and to have one point of truth where all of your business numbers are, all of your revenue, all of your inventory. And then with having that one point of truth, integrations are really strong, then you have accurate data in all of your other systems. The way that everything ties together and all of your channels tie together, I think is really key for a modern DTC multi-channel business. And I know that we talked about it earlier, but really I think that the support team is a secret weapon of Fulfil and the way that the team is just really involved and invested. It goes from support all the way to the CEO and COO, and the implementation team. There's a few different founders at Fulfil who are involved in the day-to-day operations and everyone is personally invested in your business success.