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Katrin Bauer, the founder of fashiondiaries, has achieved what many dream of: she started as a fashion blogger on Instagram a few years ago and now has her own successful fashion brand. Meanwhile, she sells several thousand orders a month through her online store. In this success story, we explain how fashiondiaries was able to achieve this and how byrd helped to improve the customer experience.
The founding story
The roots of fashiondiaries originated in 2016 with Katrin Bauer's fashion blog on Instagram. Passionate about fashion, she was already able to inspire a lot of people with her "daily looks" with her flair for fashion trends. After two years of continuously expanding her reach, the ambitious entrepreneur decided to create her own fashion online store with her own designs, being created in the home office. The first orders were packed in the basement in the evening after a long home office day and then shipped herself.
Professionalization of the e-commerce setup
After the response to the first 7 styles was very positive and an increasing number of orders was received in the online store, the founder quickly expanded her product portfolio. From this follows an important learning for many founders: Focusing on a limited product portfolio, with correspondingly fewer SKUs, is highly recommended for starting an e-commerce business in most cases.
After demand grew rapidly, Katrin Bauer hired the first employees and rented business space. Fortunately, this investment paid off and the order volume continued to grow. A year later, the e-commerce company was faced with a decision: build/rent a warehouse and hire warehouse staff or hand over shipping to a fulfillment partner?
Outsourcing of fulfillment to byrd in order to jointly expand into the European market
The e-commerce store had already experienced in the months before how the e-commerce operations caused increasingly more work due to the rapid growth, and could hardly keep up with the shipping of orders. In addition, it became apparent that it was a big challenge to hire good and motivated staff for the warehouse, as the storage space is located in a rural area.
As a result, delivery times were getting longer and longer because it was difficult to keep up with scaling with the operational processes and resources at the time. Aside from that, warehouse capacity was also starting to run out.
Therefore, the founder knew that outsourcing e-commerce fulfillment was the right strategic move. Finally, fashiondiaries decided to outsource the logistics to byrd. The decisive reason was that both companies share the same vision: Both want to conquer the EU space and byrd can enable successful scaling with its multitude of locations.
The key reason to work with byrd was the shared vision to conquer the market in the European Union. With its European logistics network, byrd can enable successful scaling into new markets.
Katrin Bauer - fashiondiaries
Improved customer satisfaction through fast order delivery
The rapid growth in the past also had negative side effects: the customer experience had to suffer somewhat due to longer delivery times. However, the anticipation of high-quality products helped online shoppers wait patiently as well. However, with the switch of fulfillment to byrd, they were now able to significantly improve the customer experience with faster shipping. Instead of delivery times of 1-2 weeks, packages are now shipped the same day, as long as the order is received before 12pm.
Through byrd we have managed to significantly speed up the shipping conditions. Before, we had a delivery time of 1-2 weeks. With byrd, all orders that come in by 12 noon are shipped the same day.
Katrin Bauer - fashiondiaries
A glimpse into the future
Thanks to the good cooperation with byrd, the company can now fully focus on the growth of the e-commerce business. By outsourcing and automating fulfillment, there is more time to push ahead with projects that are critical to success, and if there are any minor problems in the operational business, byrd is always ready to help, as Katrin Bauer confirms: "What I appreciate about byrd is the uncomplicated communication and the ability to find solutions quickly when problems arise".
Now that fashiondiaries has built up a solid and loyal customer base in Austria and Germany, its next step is to conquer the EU region and make the brand known internationally. While the company can focus on marketing and product development, byrd will ensure in this scaling phase that all orders are also delivered quickly and cost-effectively to end-customers to support the successful expansion.
Visit their website: https://shop.fashiondiaries.online/