ShipStation Story: Yumi Organics
About Yumi Organics
Yumi Organics was born in Montreal, Canada, when Zoey Li was working as a registered dietitian. In her practice, she realized most of her clients struggled to find the time to eat a balanced and healthy breakfast in the morning. To solve her client’s morning rush out the door, Zoey began recommending overnight oats (dry oatmeal that sits with milk overnight and is ready to eat straight from the refrigerator in the morning) perfect for taking on the go. Zoey discovered that having her clients prepare breakfast the night before streamlined their mornings.
After helping her clients with a quick and nutritious breakfast option, Zoey saw a niche that she could fill in the market, so she decided to launch her own overnight oats brand called Yumi Organics. With Zoey’s background in nutrition and with the sales knowledge of her co-founder, Marco Mezzaluna, the two partners put their heads together to bring Yumi Organics to life. Now, Yumi is available in 300 retail stores in Canada and also available online to the US.
The ShipStation Solution
Yumi Organics was growing rapidly and struggling to fulfill all their orders manually. They needed to find a shipping solution that would allow them to not only streamline their shipping process but give them time to focus on growing their business. After trying out a few shipping softwares, they landed on ShipStation and began streamlining their shipping process.
“We were fulfilling all our orders manually, which was super labor-intensive with lots of steps that were easy to forget and had room for human error. We decided to find a software that could help us streamline our shipping processes, and that is when we found ShipStation. They had the only software we tried that didn’t have bugs or glitches and was easy to get on-boarded.”
Natasha Saviuk, Head of Growth at Yumi Organics
Having an in-house automated inventory management software such as ShipStation, allowed the Yumi team to see all of their orders coming in from different selling channels. Now they no longer have to go through multiple selling channels and they are able to process and fulfill orders in a fraction of the time.
“ShipStation has removed all of the manual labor that used to be around shipping and completely streamlined the process, making it into a task that takes a couple of minutes, rather than a couple of hours. At the order volume that we have now, we would never be able to keep up with our orders without ShipStation,” said Saviuk.
Batch Fulfillment
The batch printing feature within ShipStation allows users to organize large numbers of shipments into customized bins, providing flexibility and control of one’s workflow. Natasha notes that their team would have had to hire a full-time employee to enter the labels manually if they didn’t have this ShipStation feature. With batch printing, the Yumi team can process hundreds of orders in a couple of seconds.
“Before ShipStation, there was so much clicking around just to create a single label, which was a really time-consuming process. It is night and day with the amount of time we save,” said Saviuk.
The ShipStation Mobile App
With the rapid growth Yumi was facing, they were able utilize the ShipStation Mobile app to connect with their fulfillment team and begin getting orders out quicker than ever. No matter where their fulfillment provider was located, they could log into the app and print thousands of labels in one click.
“With the ShipStation app on your phone, you have the ability to print all your labels from anywhere — you could even be in a different country — as long as you have the app on your phone, you can have the labels printed. This was a huge help to make sure that our fulfillment team had the packing slips and labels. Even if they were not necessarily tech-savvy, they were able to get the materials that they needed without a person physically having to go print them.”
Natasha Saviuk, Head of Growth at Yumi Organics
What’s Next For Yumi Organics
Yumi Organics’ mission is to flip the narrative and transform people’s perspectives on what fast food can look like by providing a quick and easy option made with clean ingredients. Their ambition for the future of the company is to become a household staple that is recognized worldwide.
“We get requests from people all over the world asking if we sell our product in their country. Slowly but surely, the answer will start being ‘Yes’ to all those people,” said Saviuk.
Advice to Ecommerce Businesses
In a short amount of time, Yumi Organics has grown from a passion project into an established brand shelved in grocery stores around Quebec and Ontario. So, we wanted to know what advice they would give to other ecommerce businesses just starting out. Here’s what Saviuk attributed to their overall success:
“The most important thing is knowing that there’s a market for your product and that your product is fulfilling the customer’s needs. In the beginning, it is important to focus solely on the product-market fit. You have to make sure that your product addresses the customer’s needs properly and that people enjoy it at the same time.”
Natasha Saviuk, Head of Growth at Yumi Organics
Check out Yumi Organics on Instagram or support them at yumi-organics.com.
