How July Suitcase cuts delivery time by 50% with Shippit

Who is July Suitcase?

Founded in 2019 by Richard Li, ‘reinventing the wheel’ and redesigning lightweight suitcases from the ground up was where the vision of July Suitcase first came to life. Now, July has given people the opportunity to elevate their travel with luggage that lasts a lifetime and stops the cycle of single-use travel accessories. As a result, July has created sustainable, yet durable luggage at a fraction of the traditional cost.

What was the challenge at hand?

As General Manager at July Suitcase HQ, Zhoe requires clear order fulfilment processes to ship and deliver goods, globally. However, trying to click through a series of open tabs on a desktop to book courier pick ups was time-consuming, manual work. The team was spending up to seven hours a day cold calling couriers to get shipments booked and delivered on-time to their customers, while searching for the best rates.

Like most businesses looking to retire their Excel spreadsheet, Zhoe knew that manual processes were slowing down their operations, making it hard for the business to hit their desired growth goals.

After searching for, “best integration to sync with an order management system,” the company revisited their shipping strategy to learn how to better manage fulfilling thousands of online orders.

What were the solutions?

Shipping automation to automate workflows, lower costs, and support business growth.

July Suitcase chose Shippit over other shipping platforms because of their order fulfilment and post-purchase capabilities. Shippit made it easy to scale up operations into new markets like the United States. Replacing old manual processes helped free up time for the team to focus on new product ranges and better customer experiences.

Here are three reasons why they love using Shippit:

Time-savings: By reducing time spent on the most repetitive parts of the order fulfilment process, Zhoe’s team saves 10x hours per week using Shippit’s data-driven dashboards to make informed delivery decisions in real-time.

Immense cost savings: July’s new automated order fulfillment processes saves up to $50,000 per year on resources. Since transitioning to Shippit, July’s order fulfilment workflows have become streamlined and more efficient. The ability to compare multiple delivery options, transit times and carriers in one single location, makes it easy to pivot when delays or disruptions hit the network.

“Shippit makes it easy for us to save money on deliveries across Australia and the U.S, and supports additional volumes quickly,” says Lachi Agnew, Technology Lead at July Suitcase. “I don’t know how we would have dealt with the increase in order volumes while keeping costs low.”

Improved customer delivery experience: July manages higher order volumes during peak periods and provides a reliable delivery experience with real-time tracking and delivery notifications to their customers. By using a shipping platform like Shippit, July was able to reduce time from order booked to parcel delivered by 50% and turn on additional carriers to avoid delays and disruptions.

Plus, July drives traffic back to their website on each order shipped with branded tracking and delivery notifications. Thousands of July-branded packing slips and labels keeps their brand front of mind when a customer receives an order. This encourages a reliable delivery experience, and drives repeat purchases.

What were the results?

July automates complex fulfilment processes and reduces delivery costs by 30% while maintaining customer satisfaction.

July Suitcase recognise Shippit as the backbone of every order they ship and a key competitive advantage to achieve the following results:

Created an omnichannel experience between online and offline experiences.

Bringing physical experiential retail experiences to life was an important priority for July Suitcase. “We saw a growing number of customers in Sydney, and as Australia’s largest city, it made a lot of sense to open a store in the Sydney CBD at The Galeries,” said Zhoe.

The physical store also made it easy for July Suitcase to use a ‘Ship from Store’ model. This way, July could leverage stock in-store to fulfil online orders closer to a customer’s delivery destination. The ship-from-store model also allows data from every part of their business to be centralised on the Shippit platform. As a result, July reduced overall delivery costs and created a blended online-offline retail experience.

Optimised their order fulfilment process to future-proof their business.

Shippit enables the July Suitcase team to process orders 10x faster than their previous process. With Shippit, July combined their existing systems with a quick and easy API integration to create their own custom shipping solution. This reduced the time spent fulfilling each order, as each order now requires less manual processing.

Reduced the cost of each delivery.

Shippit allows July to analyse where their customers are purchasing from and reduce the number of kilometres travelled for each order across multiple shipments. This lowers the cost of shipping by 30%, as orders no longer have to travel the extra distance, saving July money on each order shipped.