When you think of rain ponchos, you probably don’t immediately think of designer clothing. Wessel Buis, founder of Rainkiss, often had to travel to Bali for his work. Owing to the climate, a rain poncho can sometimes come in handy there. They are extremely cheap but of very poor quality. When Wessel found out that there was no such thing as a fashionable, sustainable and high-quality poncho, he founded Rainkiss. Since July 2020, the Amsterdam brand offers designer ponchos made from recycled PET bottles. “From the very first moment, demand went through the roof, no matter which market we stepped into,” says Peter van Beek of Rainkiss. Rainkiss works together with Salesupply for the fulfillment in North America, the UK and the rest of Europe.
Successful launch
“At the launch of Rainkiss, we focused on Western Europe and particularly on Germany, France and the UK,” explains Peter van Beek, IT, B2B and Raindancer at Rainkiss. “The orders came pouring in, mainly through social advertising on Facebook and Instagram. In the beginning we did the fulfillment ourselves and some days our small team was processing around 300 orders, that’s when we started looking around for a fulfillment partner.”
Fulfillment and the importance of connectivity
“Our first fulfillment partner immediately showed us the added value of external fulfillment. Not having to process orders ourselves anymore saved us a lot of time and on top of that they offered us far more attractive shipping rates.” But more is involved when it comes to choosing the right fulfillment partner. The connection between the Shopify environment of Rainkiss and the partner’s WMS turned out to be less than optimal. “Every day I spent a lot of time manually processing, checking and double-checking orders. That’s not something you want. Now with Salesupply, it’s less than 15 minutes of work and it’s so easy that I don’t even have to do it myself anymore.”
“When we also started encountering problems delivering our orders in the UK due to Brexit, we decided to search for another fulfillment partner. We then quickly came into contact with Salesupply.”
From Brexit to the US
“At Salesupply, I was able to find the plug & play connectivity of Shopify with the WMS already on the website,” Peter recalls. “Our initial question concerned fulfillment for the UK but before long, we ended up talking about the US where Salesupply also has ecommerce fulfillment centers. Because our marketing in both the US and Canada was catching on so well and it was far more economically attractive to outsource fulfillment there locally we decided to partner up with Salesupply in the US in addition to the ecommerce fulfillment center in Heerlen.”
Set-up and duplication
A major advantage of working with a global fulfillment partner is scalability. “The set-up of the warehouse in New Jersey was even easier and faster than the set-up in the Netherlands,” Peter points out.
By now, Rainkiss also incorporated local fulfillment from a Salesupply warehouse in the UK. “This was a volume-based decision because fulfillment from the warehouse in Heerlen worked well,” explains Peter. “The number of orders from the UK continued to rise and the cost savings achieved by fulfilling orders locally in the UK became very interesting.”
“We use Salesupply’s North American warehouse for fulfillment of orders in the US and Canada and the Dutch warehouse for our continental European markets. Aside from that, every new market is tested from our Dutch warehouse. We are now also in talks with Salesupply about a prospective fulfillment location in Asia to also serve Australia, New Zealand and the Asian markets from there.”
