Craft Gin Club
Creators of the world’s largest gin of the month subscription club, Craft Gin Club, personally handpick 12 gins to send out to all the gin-loving subscribers. Shipping an enormous volume of over 80,000 parcels every month, contributing to its name of the UK’s No.1 gin club.
The challenge
At the start of every month , Craft Gin Club, ships a huge volume of parcels (more than 80,000) to members – all in one go.
The logistical challenge is sizeable, and the Royal Mail Click and Drop user interface it had been historically utilising to complete the challenge, was labour intense and time consuming now that the business was growing at pace. With each batch limited to 2,000 records, it took over 40 print runs to produce all the labels needed, with each run requiring an import file to be produced.
Invariably, these files threw out import errors that needed fixing before printing could take place. An entire day was dedicated to producing the necessary shipping labels.
Following rapid growth in Craft Gin Club’s membership in 2020, this process was not sustainable for the growing business. In 2020 alone, its membership grew by 71% and online shop revenue went up by 500% in its first year.
Following a recommendation by Royal Mail, Craft Gin Club turned to Intersoft’s Intelligent Shipper® API for support with this process.
“Gin of the Month” subscription boxes being prepared for a Royal Mail collection at Craft Gin Club’s warehouse.
The solution
After looking into potential solutions, Craft Gin Club made the decision to work with Intersoft as a trusted Royal Mail partner to manage the integration and production of its shipping labels.
Intersoft worked with Craft Gin Club during the onboarding phase to adapt the label production element of its API shipping tool – Intelligent Shipper – so that all labels for each month’s shipment could be produced at the single click of a button. This would allow the business to generate all labels via Intersoft’s API in a split second on the same day of every month, ready for the parcels to be picked and packed for delivery.
Intelligent Shipper also enables Craft Gin Club to close-out their shipments for delivery each day via the API, exporting all the required tracking numbers for each delivery and easily ship the parcels using Royal Mail’s Tracked High Volume service.
During peak times, Craft Gin Club’s shipping volumes can triple, placing additional strain on the team. Intersoft’s Intelligent Shipper® API is both robust and flexible enough to adapt to sudden fluctuations in demand, removing the strain and simplifying the process.
The result
Since moving to Intersoft, Craft Gin Club now creates all 80,000+ labels in just one hour from one data exchange, freeing up resource that can be reinvested into growing the business further and providing Craft Gin Club with the peace of mind that they have partnered with a solution that can scale with this growth and, if necessary, partner with other carriers to meet business needs.
In our first year as a business we acquired over 3,000 members, and we can still remember just how exciting that felt. To now have over 140,000 members is an unbelievable achievement and it drives us to continue building our brand, both for the business and our loyal members who have shared this journey with us. Intersoft’s Intelligent Shipper® API is a key part of allowing us to continue on this path and ensuring the future success of the business.”