Customer Q&A: How Teak & Twine is Prepping For Peak Season

There is no denying it anymore. With Christmas decorations already hitting the shelves in retail stores, the holiday season has officially begun. But, there is still time to prepare your business for the large sales volumes to come during peak season.

While we’ve shared many great tips in the past for how to approach this time of the year, this time we wanted to highlight some strategies from one of our favorite customers, Teak & Twine!

Teak and Twine has been putting smiles on people's faces for nearly a decade through their custom corporate gift boxes and swag. Over the years, they’ve worked with brands such as Indeed, ESPN, and Salesforce, and have been trusted by these brands because of their quality fulfillment processes.

In fact, Teak and Twine goes beyond just corporate gifting and is also a full-scale kitting and fulfillment partner! Because they’re trusted to help businesses with shipping, assembly, storage, ghost fulfillment and more, they have to be on top of their game all year round, including the holidays.

To learn their approach, we sat down with them to ask some of the most common questions e-commerce businesses have when deciding how to prep for peak season.

When it comes to packing the products before shipping, do you change anything for this time of the year?

Customization is a huge part of our business here at Teak & Twine — and while we always offer the option to add personalized messaging with every gift that goes out, it's especially heartwarming to be able to share holiday well wishes between our customers and their employees, clients, friends, and family during the holiday season!

Additionally, one of our favorite things about the holiday season is that, in most parts of the world, the weather is cooler, which means we can easily ship one of our favorite products here at Teak & Twine: chocolate bars! During this time of year, we don't have to use insulated shipping boxes and ice packs anymore, which is very labor-intensive. So we are thrilled to be able to share our joy of chocolate with our customers all over the country this holiday season!

When it comes to stocking up for peak season, what are some of the things you look at before ordering inventory?

Heading into the holiday season, there’s a lot of planning and preparation with our kitting and e-commerce fulfillment clients.

For example, we help them analyze data from past holiday seasons in order to help them identify their best-selling products, discover trends, and recognize peak shipment times. That way, we can ensure that we always have enough inventory and enough of their products ready.

So even in the busiest times and even with our clients best-selling SKUs, we can continue to ship out all of their products within 1-3 business days — there will be no delays on our watch!

What is your approach to fulfillment operations this time of the year?

As a company that offers kitting and fulfillment, we are super adept at managing the increase in the incredible explosion of sales that happens around the holiday season. We're lucky to be able to have such a flexible, amazing team. Every year, we hire more seasonal workers specifically for the holiday season — most of whom have worked with us for years — so they are ready and willing to help with all the holiday madness.

Also, we of course look at year-over-year data in order to make sure we are stocking up and fulfilling as much as we can ahead of time, so that by the time holiday orders start rolling in, we can pull SKUs off the shelf and fulfill orders really quickly.

Aside from shipping operations, what other measures does your business take to achieve holiday season success?

Because we manage countless kitting and fulfillment orders all year long, we have super high-functioning systems in place that help us streamline and scale during the holiday season.

Our clients especially love our tech capabilities, like our Client Dashboard, which allows clients to see all of their orders processed in real-time and access real-time inventory numbers and tracking numbers for all of the orders as they're processed.

Conclusion

While it may seem like some of these strategies are just made for Teak and Twine, there is a lot that other e-commerce businesses can take away. Some of those key takeaways include:

• Going the extra mile by including personalized messaging in your packages creates a fulfillment experience your customers love and gives a lasting impression that can help drive brand loyalty.
• Take into account the changing temperatures when shipping. Some temperature-sensitive products might benefit from the cold while others might break down.
• When stocking up for peak season, be sure that you look at past year’s data as your north star. This will help identify how much of which items to order so you can avoid backorders.
• Hiring seasonal workers to help your fulfillment team can be one of the best ways to ensure packages go out on time, especially since carriers are working on very tight holiday deadlines.
• Order tracking is not only important for your business but for customers everywhere. Be sure to have your order tracking pages built and ready to go for holiday shoppers anxiously waiting for their orders.

Of course, we’d be remiss not to mention that one of the best ways to prepare for this time of the year is by using tools like Shippo. With Shippo, you can set up automations to select the proper shipping label for every order, avoid peak season surcharges from the big three major carriers, and get access to quality shipping insurance at half the cost.

To learn more about how to prepare for the busiest time of the year, check out our E-commerce Merchant’s Ultimate Guide to Preparing for Peak.