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As we close the chapter on 2023, it's time to reflect on a year marked by remarkable achievements and strategic advancements at byrd. Themed around "The Year of Efficiency," this year has seen us innovate and streamline our operations, redefining fulfillment in the e-commerce space. Here's a look at some of our key milestones:
Expanding Horizons Through Collaborative Partnerships
In the relentless pursuit of expanding horizons through collaborative partnerships, we're excited to introduce our latest milestones.
Radial and byrd Join Forces For Enhanced Fulfillment Operations
In our quest to level up our fulfillment infrastructure, we partnered with renowned Radial, a leading e-commerce and omnichannel fulfillment solutions provider and part of bpostgroup. Together we embarked on a strategic collaboration to operate a warehouse, integrating state-of-the-art automation technology. Located in Halle, central Germany, this warehouse has allowed us to increase our efficiency, ensuring even faster and more precise order processing.
Mirakl: Accessing Hundreds of Marketplaces
Our alliance with Mirakl has unlocked access to over 350 marketplaces like Decathlon, Douglas, and La Redoute, broadening our reach and offering our clients easy access to diverse markets. That allows e-commerce companies to sell via a magnitude of sales channels, while efficiently fulfilling the orders with a centralized logistics setup.
In the course of this, Leroy Merlin has become the first platform to exclusively endorse byrd as its fulfillment provider for merchants in Italy. This collaboration allows Leroy Merlin to enhance its offerings and solidify its position as a pioneer company within the ADEO Group, ranking among the top 10 e-commerce websites in the country.
Parcel Perform: Enhancing Data Quality and Customer Experience
This partnership equips byrd with additional industry-leading logistics data, standardizing events across all carriers in use. Enhanced data quality lets byrd and its customers pinpoint logistic issues, offering real-time order data via byrd's software for seamless delivery monitoring and tracking.
This system simplifies operations for our clients, enabling faster responses to customer queries and improving delivery satisfaction. Through this partnership, e-commerce retailers and D2C brands in Europe can manage their end-to-end supply chain needs more (cost) efficiently while focusing on delivering a world-class delivery experience.
Procuros: Integrating with leading ERPs
The byrd x Procuros partnership combines byrd's expansive European fulfillment network with Procuros' efficient cloud-based platform. With Procuros we enable businesses using advanced e-commerce systems and wanting to centralize their fulfillment to seamlessly integrate their system into ours.
This can be achieved by channeling the data flow through our dedicated Procuros connector that streamlines e-commerce operations via one connector to enhance efficiency. Thanks to this technology partnership we can now integrate with ERP and e-commerce systems like SAP, weclapp, JTL, NetSuite, Tradebyte, Odoo, and many more - in a matter of minutes.
“I am thrilled to see that strong partnerships have been a boosting part of our 2023 achievements to enhance customer service and empower merchants to collaborate with industry leaders. We have enjoyed exchanging insights with our partner network and look forward to creating even more value for our customers through continued collaboration in 2024.”
- Madeline Hirt, Senior Partnerships Manager
The Launch of Amazon SFP as an Independent Fulfillment Alternative
We're still excited about this year’s launch of the Amazon SFP (Seller Fulfilled Prime) method, offering more flexibility and control to our e-commerce customers. This allows them to make use of the extraordinary customer base of Amazon while being able to strengthen and capitalize on a strong brand. In other words, it allows them to get the Prime Badge and use customized fulfillment to offer a memorable post-purchase experience.
Strengthening Our International Network & Service Capabilities
At byrd, one of our biggest strengths is our ability to offer a wide range of services that fit individual markets in Europe, while at the same time providing a streamlined solution to centrally control your logistics setup. To keep being a top option for e-commerce companies we’ve been investing in maintaining and expanding our network within and throughout the markets we serve.
Expanding byrd’s Storage Capabilities With New Warehouses in France and Italy
We've expanded our footprint with new, technologically advanced warehouses in France and Italy, exemplifying our commitment to advanced solutions in logistics.
New Warehouse Near Lille
The warehouse location in Hem, near Lille, not only offers proximity to the major French and Belgian cities but also provides seamless access to neighboring markets in the Netherlands and the UK. The modern fulfillment center adds a further 72.000 square meters of storage room to our international network and guarantees fast, cost-efficient, and reliable fulfillment in France.
New Warehouse Near Milan
Just as modern and strategically located are our warehouses near Milan that helped us to further extend our European fulfillment network. More than 57.000 square meters of storage room allow our customers plenty of room to scale. At the same time, streamlined processes allow stored products to be fulfilled and delivered in Italy within 24-48 hours with our reputable partner carriers like BRT, PosteItaliane, or GLS.
New Carriers and Services
As a key player in our leading logistics service network in Europe, we collaborate with the most reputable international and national logistics partners. This way we can enable our customers to offer the best experience to their shoppers. For this reason, as of the end of 2023, we are working with 27 of the leading parcel delivery companies in Europe. Just like in the past years, we have continued to extend our network in the past 12 months.
Sticking to our Values: Becoming Greener While Staying Colorful, & Social
While the logistics industry can be a tough one, and margins are often tight, we acknowledge our responsibility for our impact on the environment as well as on social factors of our employees and people we work with. Truth be told, it’s not easy to become a truly green fulfillment company, however, step by step, we’re taking measures to lead the way in the industry.
Environmental Initiatives
We've undertaken various projects focused on reducing our environmental impact, and staying true to our commitment to sustainability. While we are aware that there’s still a long way to go, we can confidently say that we’re moving in the right direction.
Planting Trees
Maintaining our annual tradition, we partnered up with One-Tree-Planted to yet again plant trees - 2107 trees to be specific. After doing so in Scotland (2020), Portugal (2021), and Iceland (2022), this year we joined the efforts in Jutland, Denmark.
While we know that this is only a small contribution to a more environmentally friendly operation, we’re proud to say that 2107 fully-grown trees can store roughly 44.247 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, which translates to compensating for roughly 421.400 shipped packages (weighing 1kg, traveling 1.000 kilometers when transported in a lorry).
Sustainability Committee
Another small, yet important step forward was the foundation of the sustainability committee. Its 10 members are part of multiple teams, levels, and office locations. That results in an effective, cross-functional mix of expertise. The committee understands the responsibility that comes with working in the e-commerce logistics industry. However, they promote the belief that everyone can take action and that the sustainability journey starts with small steps.This group aims to achieve 3 goals:
- Make our offices greener
- Enable more sustainable fulfillment services
- Share knowledge and experience within the company
“In the end, focusing on sustainability is not a nice-to-have option anymore - it’s an absolute must! Especially as a byrdie."
- Fabian Reiser, Lead of Sustainability Committee and Project Manager - Supply Chain
Inclusive Company Culture
Our open-minded approach has fostered a diverse and inclusive workplace, where everyone's ideas are valued and celebrated. In fact, we’re proud to have byrdies from 53 countries on the team.
Empowering Women and Celebrating Our Female Workforce
At byrd, we have a team of skilled and diverse women in various kinds of fields and positions who are making valuable contributions to our company every day. Unfortunately, this is still noteworthy, especially in the logistics industry, where women are historically underrepresented. One of the role models is our CCO and co-founder Petra Dobrocka, making sure gender diversity is part of byrd’s culture from the get-go.
While living this culture daily is key, events like our internal fireside chat to celebrate the remarkable women in our team and to hear their inspiring stories, highlight our uncompromising fight for more female power in our industry.
Events: Fostering Innovation and Community
Another part of our culture is to bring teams and partners together and engage in events that allow them to step out of their daily routines to get creative and foster innovation and community. Besides the events mentioned below, we engaged in hosting events like our partner Billbee’s or ChannelEngine’s Meetups.
Hackathon
One event that highlights our drive for innovation is byrd’s annual Hackathon in Berlin where at the end of 2 intensive days, 8 teams presented their creative initiatives on the theme of ‘Process Optimization’ to the entire company and panel of judges.
Other byrdies then listened to the pitches of the teams and voted for the winners. A commitment was made to dedicate further time to many of the excellent proposals.
Stay tuned for our innovations in 2024.
“The hackathon is a great opportunity for collaborative brainstorming and problem-solving, where we identify bottlenecks and envision seamless processes that ultimately enhance the experience for our customers."
- Ian Clark, Director of Engineering
The winning team was crowned, being presented with a brand new Raspberry Pi as well as a beautiful trophy featuring byrd's mascot Boxie
Engaging Company Events
From volleyball tournaments to axe throwing, curling, bowling, comedy shows, and building gingerbread (ware)houses, our social events have been a cornerstone of our vibrant company culture. Additionally, our boat party in Prague was a highlight for the whole team.
Trade Fairs
This year, yet again, byrdies were busy joining trade fairs, spreading the word, and talking to customers, partners, and industry experts. Some of the fairs we visited include eShow Barcelona, Madrid Tech Show, eCongress Málaga, Retail Chain E-commerce Paris, ECD Paris, Netcomm Forum in Milan, IRX & eDX in Birmingham, Multichannelday 2023 in Cologne, and the OMR festival in Hamburg.
Yearly byrdday event
Like last year, we used our birthday (the 7th already) to come together with partners, customers, and industry leaders to discuss the state of e-commerce and the logistics industry. Additionally, byrd’s C-level reflected on the past year presenting already launched new features and services. Last but not least we shared insights on the plans for the upcoming year.
In case you missed it, you can watch the replay here.
2024 Vision: Onward and Upward
What would a wrap-up be without a glimpse into the future?
Looking ahead to 2024 we continue to build the leading European e-commerce fulfillment standard by continuing to grow in our 7 core markets.
We'll be strengthening our warehouse automation efforts, enabling warehouses to process even larger parcel volumes and allow for more streamlined processes and better storage efficiency.
Furthermore, we recognize the importance of adapting and evolving based on the valuable feedback we receive from our customers. Hence, byrd will be improving existing processes based on customer and partner feedback.
This coming year will see us enhancing our B2B fulfillment and shipping functionalities, finetuning our shipping option selections even more as well as further improving packaging material selection to ensure the most optimal packaging option for every parcel.
These initiatives represent just a portion of our ongoing dedication to excellence and innovation in e-commerce logistics. One thing is sure, we are thrilled to start the new year (with you?).