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As the year 2022 draws to a close and the Christmas craze gradually shifts into a more relaxed & enjoyable pace, we gaze back to reassess the year in passing. Let’s take a step back and reflect on the experiences we have gained, the challenges we faced, and the opportunities we took as a team. This year, yet again, brought global challenges, like record-breaking inflation, to the e-commerce and logistics industries. Despite this, we are proud to say that we can draw a positive conclusion when looking back at 2022.
2022 is a year in which we expanded to Southern Europe, adding fulfillment locations in Italy and Spain, bringing our number of active warehouses to 25, and allowing us to fulfill orders for our clients from 7 European countries. We topped up our €16 million funding from 2021 to a total of almost €70 million within 10 months with our series C round and further built our international fulfillment network. All that while improving our services with new integrations and features. Finally, in line with our values, we did not forget about our social and environmental responsibility.
We raised new funding to keep building the European fulfillment standard
As a VC-backed scale-up, we were extremely proud to announce a €50 million funding round (series C) in May. It was led by sector specialists Cambridge Capital, with participation from Speedinvest, Mouro Capital, Elevator Ventures, and other existing shareholders. This capital injection has been helping us to fuel our service development and growth.
Ciao Italia & Hola España
One important step towards continuously building the standard for European fulfillment was to expand our warehouse network to Italy and Spain.
Our first e-commerce warehouse in Italy is strategically located in the North of the country and enables merchants to easily reach customers throughout the country with three of the most popular shipping service providers in Italy - Poste Italiane, GLS, and BRT Corriere Espresso.
The same is true for byrd’s fulfillment center in Spain. Located close to Madrid, it enables fast and efficient shipping to Spanish online shoppers, as well as posing an attractive solution for selling to neighboring countries. For that we partnered up with GLS and Correos, both are trusted shipping providers in Spain.
To make all of that possible we got to know and hired amazing new Italian- and Spanish-speaking byrdies.
Solidifying our position and improving our services
The logistics branch never stands still, and neither do we. There are always ways to improve our services to help optimize the operational setup of e-commerce businesses. Hence, we tirelessly work on improving our products and services as well as tying close and ongoing relationships with partners. Check out some of our new features and integration in 2022.
New features
Our aspiration has always been to offer services that, on the one hand, facilitate logistics for our customers while, on the other hand, presenting a fulfillment solution that enables more cost-efficient, faster and greener storage and delivery in e-commerce.
We’re proud of our achievements this year and will mention just a few here. One of the new features we successfully launched is serial number tracking. It allows you to gain granular control and transparency over your products. Furthermore, it opens up our fulfillment services to the electronics industry, where this is a necessity. Additionally, we’ve worked on offering the possibility of B2B shipping. Another feature that sets us apart from competitors is, that the handling of dangerous goods is no problem for us in most of our fulfillment countries.
In addition, we’re now offering many of our proven services in new markets. Do you want an example or two? Here we go! We’re now offering pick-up point deliveries in France as well as access to our beloved returns portal in most of our markets.
New integrations
An important part of our growth strategy is working on new integrations. It helps to make our services available to new e-commerce companies and it improves our services for existing customers. Let’s look at three of these new integrations - Prestashop, Xentral, and ChannelEngine.
Prestashop is one of the most popular shop systems and is especially trusted by e-commerce retailers in France and Spain. The Xentral integration allows merchants to seamlessly integrate their ERP system with our software and benefit from a powerful combination of both. Finally, integrating ChannelEngine and byrd enables centralized logistics for sales via multiple marketplaces - a smart way to grow sales while keeping operational complexity low.
By the way, we’re proud that our Shopify app was chosen as one of Shopify’s staff picks of the year.
Additional byrd highlights 2022
Besides some of the operational highlights mentioned above, there were additional highlights that should not go unnoticed.
Work hard play hard
As a team, we managed to overcome many challenges and seized opportunities. How to better celebrate ourselves than by bringing the whole team together for one of our infamous byrd parties. That’s exactly what we did this summer.
True to the motto "work hard, play hard" we turned the night into day and together we transformed the Treehaus in Berlin into a dance floor.
We like to move it, move it
2022 was also a year of office moves for byrd. In fact, we moved to no less than 3 new offices in Vienna, Berlin, and London. Furthermore, we have teams visiting flexible WeWork workspaces in Spain and Italy as well as remote byrdies from multiple different locations.
It all started with our long-awaited move to our new Berlin office at WeWork Alexanderplatz at the end of February.
Next, our move within Vienna followed for the same reason and we decided to say goodbye to our beloved office in Mariahilfer Straße to move to a bigger office at Wiedner Hauptstraße. Fun fact, that’s really close to where the journey started more than six years ago.
Other than in Berlin and Vienna, we did not move but set up a new office location in London. One can tell that our logo will always be well-protected.
Sticking to our values
In 2016 byrd started with a goal - to revolutionize the e-commerce logistics industry in Europe. Not only that but to do it in a way that levels the playing field for e-commerce companies and by sticking to our values. They entail social as well as environmental impacts and are still being held high in 2022 and beyond.
Social responsibility at byrd
One part of our social responsibility is offering a safe space for all of our employees independent of origin, religious or sexual orientation, or anything else that makes us who we are. Of course, in 2022, this should be the standard everywhere. For this reason, throughout the year, we stood up for our beliefs.
One of the examples that can be mentioned is our (successful) contribution to discrimination-free blood donation in Austria. Additionally, we’re continuously trying to educate people by giving experts and employees the chance to highlight important topics. Two examples are our black history month & pride month contribution. A special thank you goes to those byrdies that tirelessly push these topics. Another big shoutout goes to our employees who initiated ad-hoc solutions to help the Ukrainian population as well as to partners and customers who joined us in trying to help as well as we can.
Environmental responsibility at byrd
Working in the e-commerce logistics sector we are very much aware of our responsibility to minimize the negative impact on our environment. For this reason, we partnered up with Climate Partner to stay a climate-neutral company (as in 2020 and 2021).
For that, we offset 453 812,61 kg of carbon emission by supporting projects in Columbia and Brazil. Of course, we stuck to our Christmas tradition with OneTreePlanted and supported an afforestation campaign in Iceland by planting 2490 trees.
Besides that, we are proud to offer carbon-neutral shipping options to our customers. Finally, to help merchants to develop a more environmentally friendly setup, we've created a comprehensive guide that you can download free of cost below.
Onwards and upwards in 2023?
2022 has been an amazing year, full of growth on a personal and corporate level. The goals for 2023 will stay the same, simplifying and improving the fulfillment setup of e-commerce companies selling in Europe and beyond. We promise to give our all to improve our services, establish even closer relationships, and expand our network of fulfillment centers.
We wish all of our employees, partners, customers, investors, and everyone that joins our journey all the best for 2023. Thank you very much and don’t forget to fulfill your potential.