Aterian Uses Flexible Warehousing Infrastructure to Achieve 97% Two-Day or Less Delivery Speeds
Key Takeaways
- Aterian needed to grow their domestic supply chain network—fast. They risked lost online sales by not offering fast delivery
- Flexe and Aterian partnered on developing a network of fulfillment nodes to support national coverage for 1-2 day delivery, optimizing cost and delivery speed. Aterian deployed a 12-node network with Flexe
- Now Aterian ships thousands of orders per day, delivering 76% of orders to customers in one day and 97% in two days
- Kevin Nohl, Aterian’s senior vice president of global supply chain, explains, “The Flexe partnership gives us the opportunity to grow very quickly without having to invest in large capital infrastructure costs. The Flexe Technology Platform allows us to manage our inventory in real time across multiple warehouses and allows our network to work seamlessly.”
The following transcript has been revised for brevity and clarity.
Kevin Nohl – Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain, Aterian:
Aterian is the consumer-packaged goods company of the future. We have 14 different brands and 2000 SKUs. So our products include everything from essential oils to refrigerators.
With the pandemic, everyone saw the growth and proliferation of eCommerce. The challenges that it creates is increased cost for transportation of goods, increased costs for storage of goods and then also the increased costs of last-mile transportation.
Customer expectations for eCommerce are very high. And that bar has been set by Amazon. The Flexe partnership gives us an opportunity to grow very quickly without having to invest in large capital infrastructure costs. As an eCommerce seller, we’re able to very quickly find locations in different parts of the country and then get inventory there. This Harrisburg facility is our number one volume shipper for us. We support all eCommerce orders for the Northeast United States out of this facility.
Michael O’Donnell – President and CEO, Inland Star:
Our whole focus is about our culture, to do it right. When we’re dealing with Aterian’s business, we might get 3000 orders today, another 4000 tomorrow, so we’ve got to ramp up to satisfy that peak. And we also need to know how to slow it down. Just by virtue of Aterian’s growth, taking advantage of three of our stock keeping locations in three huge markets for them is a testament to how the partnership with Flexe works. We operate on Flexe’s system, and we found it to be very user friendly. It’s easy to learn. It’s nimble, it’s quick.
Jerome Garrett – Operations Manager, Inland Star:
As far as the SLAs go, we have a cut-off at 3 p.m. Even on heavy days, we’re able to meet their demands. We’re able to customize waving. And even on Saturdays, we’re able to customize a wave for air shipments.
Michael O’Donnell – President and CEO, Inland Star:
Every order is a perfect order. Aterian leans on us here in Harrisburg, but we are also doing two times that volume in Fresno, California. And also about the same in L.A.
Kevin Nohl – Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain, Aterian:
Aterian’s growth has been phenomenal in the past few years. Our compounded annual growth rate is 61% [based on financial information as of 12/31/2021]. As we grow, from a supply chain perspective, we need to ship more. The growth has been in parallel with the growth that we’ve experienced with Flexe. We’ve been able to be very successful at forward stocking our inventory through all different types of demand.
We’ve grown from just a few warehouses to double digit warehouses. We’re able to deliver 76% of our orders in one day to our customers. And 97% of our orders are delivered within two days. That’s all shipping from the Flexe warehouses to the end customer. Which is pretty awesome.
