Learn how educational toy brand Domino & Juliette leverages ShipBob’s outsourced fulfillment solutions, omnichannel expertise, and inventory placement to position them for success at scale.
Customer Profile
Domino & Juliette is a kids’ toy and learning brand that creates thoughtfully designed, educational play products to make learning fun and accessible for children aged 0-10 years. Their curriculum-inspired toys – including ABC and 123 Find & Fit puzzles, placemats, dominos, and bundled learning kits – focus on developmental skills such as literacy, math, and fine motor play while being safe, durable, and easy to clean. Domino & Juliette also donates a 24-pack of crayons to children in need with every purchase.
Key metrics
- 5 ShipBob fulfillment centers
- 80% cost-savings on inbound inventory movement
About Domino & Juliette
The COVID-19 lockdown forced parents to get creative with their children’s education – but Cali Carleton was more prepared than most.
As a homeschooling mother-of-four running a screen-free household, Cali found that many learning tools on the market weren’t nearly safe, effective, and easy to clean as they needed to be, so she began developing her own. She started sharing her tips and tools with a broader audience during the pandemic, which were met with rave reviews; before long, her social media presence became a brand all its own, which she called Domino & Juliette.
Cali worked with educators to develop multipurpose educational toys that parents could trust, and spent years testing materials to ensure the highest quality, safest, and most durable products possible. Domino & Juliette now offers dozens of placements, puzzles, and blocks beloved by parents and kids alike.
We sat down with Cali Carleton, Founder and CEO of Domino & Juliette, to discuss how ShipBob’s outsourced fulfillment solutions, omnichannel expertise, and inventory placement position them for success at scale.
Partnering with a professional logistics platform pre-launch to secure scalable fulfillment
As told to ShipBob by Cali Carleton, Founder and CEO of Domino & Juliette.
Even before we officially launched the brand, we knew that we would need help managing logistics. My husband had a day job, I homeschooled and taught full-time, and there simply wouldn’t be time to manage picking, packing, and shipping orders. It would be a huge undertaking, so we would need to find efficiencies where we could.
In addition, we just didn’t have physical space for it. Our manufacturer’s minimum quantities for orders were so substantial that we filled up two full transportation containers of product. It wasn’t going to fit in our garage or our basement, but it’s extraordinarily expensive to rent our own warehouse space.
Ultimately, we needed a 3PL partner that could offer us the best of both worlds – a partner that could store our inventory and outsource fulfillment, saving both time and money.
To that end, we knew we needed a provider that could handle products in our vertical, work with SMB brands but scale with us in the future, and be cost effective; but that was easier said than done.
We found that there just aren’t that many brands that rise to the top and meet all those requirements – but ShipBob did! The more we looked into case studies and had conversations with them, the more we felt that ShipBob met all of our needs, in terms of experience with our product category, cost, and scalability.
Trusting Amazon fulfillment to the experts to make multichannel expansion easy
A big part of scaling a brand is getting in front of customers, and to do that, you have to start selling through multiple channels.
That can be really overwhelming and intimidating for brands like ours that are still growing and exploring channels for the first time, so thank goodness we had ShipBob to help us. ShipBob has the capabilities and expertise to make scaling into new channels easy.
For instance, we recently decided to start selling our products on Amazon. While the knockoff risk is strong, it’s one of the most effective ways to get in front of customers, so it was worth the risk – especially with ShipBob helping us master the logistics side of things.
We use a combination of FBA and FBM, so we rely on ShipBob to both prepare our FBA orders and fulfill some of our Amazon volume for us. Ramping up with both these programs was very smooth, because ShipBob walked us through exactly how to how to connect into Amazon and how to execute fulfillment effectively. We’re new to this and we don’t know how to do it, so ShipBob’s team’s been very strong in working through the details with us, and showing us how it all works.
“If you’re a new, young, or up-and-coming brand that doesn’t have an army of logistical personnel on staff, ShipBob offers you that expertise. All of the people that I have dealt with at ShipBob are extremely competent and knowledgeable – even if they can’t solve a problem specifically and directly themselves, they know who can and will go to great lengths to find solutions and achieve the right outcome. They really understand the customer journey, and have the capabilities and drive to help you optimize it.”
Cali Carleton, Founder and CEO of Domino & Juliette
Leveraging ShipBob’s B2B fulfillment solution to launch and automate retail distribution
On top of online marketplaces, we’re also in the process of launching our first partnership with a major retailer. This retailer wants to stock our product in their brick and mortar stores, and understandably has high standards in terms of what they need to see from any brand, so we’re relieved we have an expert partner like ShipBob to navigate B2B complexities for us.
The ShipBob team is competent at B2B. They helped us set up EDI-automated retail distribution via SPS Commerce, so B2B orders are processed as seamlessly as DTC orders and in full compliance with the retailer’s unique requirements.
We had an excellent B2B implementation manager, Carlos, who got the SPS Commerce connection going. He’s actually the same person that helped us onboard with ShipBob! He was so helpful getting our SKUs configured in the ShipBob dashboard and setting everything up back then, and he’s been very, very helpful getting the ball rolling for B2B.
Achieving 80% cost-savings on inbound inventory movement through ShipBob’s Inventory Placement Program
The Inventory Placement Program (IPP) is an efficient way to not only cut last-mile shipping costs, but also to streamline inbound inventory distribution.
Before we were using IPP, we treated inbound distribution like a B2C order; if we had to send 500 units of a product, it would cost us several hundred dollars at regular carrier rates to move it to a fulfillment center.
IPP leverages economies of scale to bring those costs down.
Instead of arranging and paying for 5 inventory freight shipments to 5 fulfillment centers, we just ship all our inventory to one ShipBob hub and ShipBob takes care of regionally distributing it for us using the middle-mile network that they’ve already built out.
It’s faster and way more cost-effective – we’re saving 80% or more on inbound inventory movement.
Plus, the Inventory Placement Program automates inventory allocation balancing for us. ShipBob’s algorithm calculates optimal inventory levels for each fulfillment center based on historical order volumes and past sales trends, and automatically distributes inventory accordingly.
Turning customer snags into opportunities with a reliable, accountable partner that supports us through peak season
Peak volumes mean more chances for things to go wrong, and every brand has a couple times during peak where orders arrive late – not because of them or their logistics partner, but because the carriers are just swamped with the pipeline volume at that time of year.
It’s part of the business, and I always view these as opportunities to define your brand and really show what it’s made of, and ShipBob shares that mindset.
“If something goes wrong with an order, the customer doesn’t blame the carrier – they blame the brand. Even if we have nothing to do with an error, our brand is ultimately held responsible, so it’s critical to find an accountable partner that takes issues seriously.
ShipBob is that partner for us. They see themselves as an extension of our brand, and act like it. They see our problems like their problems, which is absolutely invaluable. Whenever we feel a little bit lost with a customer issue, ShipBob is there to help us bridge that gap and turn complaints into opportunities.”
Cali Carleton, Founder and CEO of Domino & Juliette
In the few instances where our orders experienced delays this peak season, ShipBob customer support was extraordinarily helpful, and always took steps to make it right.
That’s a huge strength of ShipBob’s: their customer service team members are armed with the authority to make decisions and take action, without getting bogged down in endless approvals and bureaucracy. The fact that those individuals are empowered to do their job makes our job easier!
Optimizing packaging type and size for every order with ShipBob’s packaging selection algorithm
ShipBob has helped us optimize our packaging. They know the dimensions of each of our SKUs, and when it comes time to pack an order, their algorithm automatically calculates the ideal packaging type and size based on that order’s particular contents.
That way, for example, single placemats are sent out in compact bubble mailers, rather than huge, mostly empty boxes. It’s much less wasteful, and more cost-effective for us.
What’s next for Domino & Juliette
As we continue to scale, we’re going to keep growing our omnichannel presence. Amazon will continue to be a huge focus for us, and we’re confident that launching our first retail distribution partnership will unlock other B2B opportunities. We’re even looking into redesigning our product packaging for brick-and-mortar stores, so that customers can see exactly what they’re getting when it’s on the shelf.
We’re also pursuing partnerships with educational distributors. So many orders come in that are clearly from educators or educational organizations, so we’d love to find ways to work with them and offer them even more value.
Ultimately, though, our focus has been and always will be on creating amazing, enriching products that are built to last a lifetime – products of incomparable quality that are still accessibly priced – and giving back to underprivileged kids through our Color the World crayon donation campaign. We’re thrilled to help parents and kids around the world, and so happy to have a partner like ShipBob helping us do it!
Domino & Juliette’s team at ShipBob
Carlos Cruz
Carlos is the Sr. Implementation Manager who onboarded Domino & Juliette to ShipBob.
Nikita Riya
Nikita is the Merchant Success Manager at ShipBob who supports Domino & Juliette.
Get started with ShipBob
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