In 2019, we partnered with Nisolo and saved them 22% on their shipping costs through contract negotiations. Last year, we gave them early access to the Reveel’s Shipping Intelligence® Platform.
Besides creating luxury crafted accessories, Nisolo’s mission is to lead the fashion industry toward sustainability and more ethical practices. You can see it in their exceptional design and feel it in their mission to value the producer and the planet as much as the consumer.
To deliver on this vision, Nisolo works hard to minimize overhead. As an eCommerce retailer, it’s a challenge to keep shipping costs low.
Read on to see how Omari Whyte, Director of Operations at Nisolo, uses the Reveel platform to monitor their shipping spend, take action to lower their costs, and plan for business growth.
Contract Analysis and Agreement Management
Shipping agreements play a significant role in overall shipping costs for eCommerce companies, and Nisolo is no different. Omari and the Nisolo team first reached out to Reveel to help them negotiate with FedEx and UPS and select the carrier with the best overall rates.
Now, with the platform’s Contract Analysis tool, Omari can quickly compare new offers to see if they’re worth further negotiations. Even though they do most of their business with FedEx, UPS reaches out every few months with a proposal to try and win their business.
“It’s usually a shell game,” said Omari. “The carriers will do better in some areas and worse in others that they’re unwilling to budge on.”
Now, Omari has access to quick information and can partner with his Reveel analyst to strategize Nisolo’s next move.
Not only does the platform make it easier for him to see the differences between contracts, but it also makes it easier to impart it to the rest of the management team.
Spotting Minimums
Omari and the Reveel team spent the last round of negotiations focusing on their DIM divisor, and they got it to a pretty good place. By looking at their VitalFactors™ and their Reveel Peer Index™ (RPI), Omari identified their next point of focus: Minimums.
Using the “Minimums” Vital Factor Peer Comparison, Omari saw that their minimums were in the red zone (considered poor), so now he’s working with his Reveel account manager and FedEx to improve it.
Although this data might have been available to him with his old reports, he wouldn’t have seen the opportunity unless he specifically looked for it. Even then, he wouldn’t have had the peer comparison data to contextualize the number.
“It goes back to the peer index,” said Omari. “I could run that report, but I didn’t have the peer index to say if we’re on track or if we were missing the mark.”
Strategic, Long-Term Planning
Post-pandemic closures, Nisolo is experiencing a high-growth period. Between February and March of 2021, their business has grown 80% month over month.
As you can imagine, an increase in sales for an eCommerce company also increases shipping costs and other operational challenges. Omari can use data from the platform to create project models and create a long-term strategic plan.
One of the KPIs the platform provides is “Average Zone,” which tells you which zone(s) you ship to the most. Zones are relative to where you’re shipping from, and prices go up the farther your items travel.
For a quickly growing business like Nisolo, shipping zones can significantly influence future planning, especially when expanding production.
Growing out of their current footprint, Nisolo plans to expand their operations using a third-party logistics company. Adding locations presents an opportunity for them to lower their shipping costs—if they use their shipping data to select new locations.
Should they have just one location more centrally located? Do they split operations by coast? The answer to these questions can be informed by the data found in the Reveel platform.
“This information allows us to better think through that decision,” said Omari. Finding the answer to these questions would have taken much longer without it, he said.
Saving Work-hours
So is the platform replacing any tools for our clients? Not really—but that’s because there aren’t any tools that do what the Reveel platform does.
Nisolo had a team member manually pulling historical data every Monday and putting it into a spreadsheet. Only then would Omari get usable information he could interpret and generate insights from.
Now, he can glance at a dashboard to see where to put his attention, get actionable insights harvested using machine learning, and then run detailed reports.
“I’m spending more time acting on the data as opposed to pulling the data,” said Omari.
See What You Can Do with Power of Shipping Intelligence®
This just scratches the surface of what you can do with the Reveel Shipping Intelligence Platform. The more you use the platform to actively manage your shipping contract, the more you can save.
Learn more about the platform and try it out for free.
