Beverage startup bubbles to the top of grocers’ lists
As a fast-moving recreational beverage startup brought on new customers and streamlined their production processes, they looked to SPS Commerce to help them meet demand and ensure profitability by handling the complexities of modern product distribution.
The challenge:
The startup brand required a more efficient way to move products via each sales channel, onboard new customers and keep margins workable for a new company.
The solution:
SPS Fulfillment
The result:
A continued track record of growth, with the brand expanding its product range and cementing partnerships with KeHe, Walmart, Shopify and Amazon while minimizing cost and complexity.
The challenge
Focused on creating recreational drinks for a customer that might split their free time between their local gym and the Vegas strip, a startup beverage brand began growing quickly after receiving positive reactions in a pro food lab. But despite interest from top retailers, the beverage brand had a hard time handling the complexities of modern distribution. Getting products on shelves nationwide while navigating shifting seller requirements, shipping rate spikes and storage challenges presented the brand with a variety of hurdles to overcome before it could take advantage of the new opportunities on its doorstep.
To move forward, the business needed to:
- Obtain more detailed sales data on specific products being sold in different packs
- Streamline new customer onboarding while meeting and managing their requirements
- Organize and analyze critical business data to make smarter real-time decisions
The solution
As conversations progressed with big box stores, the brand realized it needed a solution to help comply with the data and packing demands of leading retailers. That’s when the brand reached out to SPS Commerce to talk about EDI options and how to simplify the immense amount of buyer data needed to stay competitive.
In addition to improved access to and control over critical data, the brand was able to use built-in connections from SPS to expedite their onboarding process, leading to new sales opportunities in a breadth of local markets. The upgrades also made it possible to better interface with 3PLs and other logistics partners, allowing the business to streamline costs and mitigate surprise disruptions.
The results
With a full-service solution in place from SPS Commerce, the brand can easily manage critical information like order numbers, UPC data, item descriptions and invoices, freeing up the time to take on relationships with more requirement-heavy retailers and leading to better saturation across the North American market. Unified data also helped the brand right-size inventory and employee effort across sales channels from better visibility into order status and delivery details.
The company’s drive to offer a differentiated option in the recreational beverage space has caused other retailers to take notice, and new opportunities are coming into focus that could strengthen their foothold across more leading grocers—and beyond.
As the business continues to grow, SPS is committed to extending more full-service solutions to help them better handle shipping, storage and inventory visibility.
