Learn how natural wellness brand Earthley improved efficiency, reduced lead times, and achieved faster fulfilment using ShipBob’s WMS in their warehouse.
Customer Profile
Earthley is a natural health and wellness brand that’s on a mission to change the way the world sees healthcare. Made from whole and unprocessed plant materials, Earthley’s products are 100% clean and designed to support health naturally. With a wide range of treatments for a variety of ailments, Earthley empowers individuals to take a more active role in their health, and discover solutions tailored to their unique body.
Key metrics
- 2x revenue YOY each year for 7 years
- >2x increase in productivity with ShipBob’s WMS
- 4 days cut from average lead time (avg. days to ship)
- 0.8 day average time to ship orders now
- 10x faster picking process
As a parent, what do you do when your child is struggling with health issues that mainstream healthcare can’t seem to solve?
This was the question Ben and Kate Tietje faced in 2009, when prescriptions and specialists’ advice failed to help their oldest daughter’s health and developmental issues.
Desperate, the pair turned to herbal remedies. Because there were few clean and all-natural products widely available at the time, the Tietjes tried making their own. And when their first product cleared a rash in just hours, they knew they were onto something.
Kate began studying herbs, learning from expert herbalists, and creating more natural remedies, from salves to deodorants and everything in-between. These remedies did wonders for their daughter’s health, and Kate chronicled her successes and recipes daily on a blog so other parents could find answers faster, and even make their own remedies at home.
Over the next 6 years, the blog grew increasingly popular, eventually reaching more than 500,000 unique readers a month. Readers loved their recipes, but many didn’t have time to make it themselves, so Ben and Kate started an ecommerce store to make their remedies more accessible. Earthley took off like a rocket, and has since doubled revenue year over year for 7 years in a row.
We sat down with Ben Tietje, Co-Founder and CEO, and Angel Seals, Supply Chain Supervisor at Earthley, to discuss how ShipBob’s WMS has helped them keep fulfilment in-house while keeping up with demand.
Hitting a breaking point with an unscalable operations system
As told to ShipBob by Ben Tietje, Co-Founder and CEO of Earthley.
Logistics can quickly become overwhelming for a growing business that is doubling in size each year. When we were fulfilling 1-2K orders per month out of our Columbus, OH warehouse, we could manage everything ourselves pretty well.
But once our volume grew to more than 10K monthly orders, everything went off the rails. Nothing worked anymore, because the system we were using just couldn’t manage the complexity and scale of our operations.
In 2022, we hit our breaking point. Our warehousing and fulfilment system was completely dysfunctional, and it took 5 days on average to prepare orders for shipping, just because of the complexity of our operations and how much labour it took to ship each package; we were sometimes needing to touch the same order 10 times, between the point picking started until it was finally shipped out. We knew we needed a different WMS if we were going to scale.
“One of the things that set ShipBob apart from other companies we were considering was the scale at which they’re operating.
There were very few providers that could support even one customer that is doing hundreds of thousands of packages in a month, and a lot of the systems would fall apart once you started to scale to any kind of degree.
ShipBob’s system is built to handle millions of orders per month, so businesses can scale with peace of mind.”
Ben Tietje, Co-Founder and CEO of Earthley
Finding a WMS that just clicked
@earthleywellness Come take a trip with our Goodnight Lotion from labelling to shipment! #Goodnightlotion #EarthleyWellness #Productjourney #RestWell #NaturalLotions ♬ original sound – Earthley Wellness Official
We interviewed around a dozen different SaaS providers before ShipBob was on our radar, and I felt like none of them met our needs. They were all missing key features that you can’t run a business without.
For instance, using universal product code (UPC) verification — the process of scanning a product’s barcode to track inventory as it moves through fulfilment — was incredibly important to us.
Half of the vendors’ systems could only do UPC verification on pick or pack, but not both, which leaves you prone to errors.
Then, I stumbled across ShipBob. From the very first call, I thought, “This is it.”
ShipBob is a global fulfilment platform that wrote its own software instead of using someone else’s, and uses it to run their own outsourced fulfilment service. That was definitely a solution we could trust, and the solution we wanted.
Doubling productivity with ShipBob’s WMS
ShipBob’s WMS has turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be.
They have built a really robust software system that does a fantastic job at running warehousing and fulfilment operations.
Once your team is trained on the system (which takes a few hours at most), it becomes easy to set things on autopilot and establish a repeatable process.
“ShipBob’s WMS has more than doubled, if not tripled, our productivity in terms of labour hours. Our average days to ship is now only 0.8 days, so most packages are shipping same-day or next-day, with rare exceptions.
We’ve cut 4 days of lead time because orders are getting processed, fulfilled, and shipped more efficiently. When we first started with ShipBob, we were doing about 15K orders per month, and now we’re processing 30K — double what we were doing just six months ago.”
Ben Tietje, Co-Founder and CEO of Earthley
Enjoying real-time, high-quality customer service
Having spent 10 years in EIT at a Fortune 20 company, I’ve worked with over 100 different SaaS providers — and ShipBob has one of the highest quality customer service and tech support teams that I’ve ever worked with.
ShipBob’s customer service is certainly one of the quickest in terms of getting questions answered and issues resolved quickly.
“When we had an issue with one of the pick processes, I brought it up to a member of ShipBob’s team — and three days later, they had completely solved the issue not just for us, but for every one of their customers. I can’t think of any SaaS provider who would have fixed a problem like that within a couple of days, bar none. ShipBob is knocking it out of the park.”
Ben Tietje, Co-Founder and CEO of Earthley
What’s next for Earthley
We’re expecting pretty substantial growth going forward! The natural health industry is growing like crazy, so I think we’ve got quite a number of good years to come — especially with ShipBob’s WMS supporting our in-house operations. I look forward to the day when we’re shipping 100,000 packages a month, which should be here before we know it!
Now that we can handle high order volumes, we want to start scaling into new channels. We’ll be opening our first retail location in Columbus, Ohio at the end of the year, and we’re starting to white label our products as well.
We’re thrilled that we have the system and tools in place to grow, because at the end of the day, Earthley’s purpose is to serve and help as many people as possible.
Healthcare shouldn’t be one-size fits all, and we want to equip people to take charge of their own unique health, and continue showing them all the ways they can help themselves. That’s why we’ve always intentionally manufactured products in-house, and done our own fulfilment, to keep our costs low for people to be able to afford them.
Our goal is to set an example for tailored, individual-centric care that other companies can emulate — and ShipBob definitely brings us closer to that goal.
Earthley’s team at ShipBob
Joel Bebermeyer
Joel is the Account Executive at who helped Earthley get onboarded with ShipBob.
Christian Cole
Christian is a Merchant Success Specialist at ShipBob and helps support Earthley.
Let’s talk about ShipBob’s WMS
Click the button below to get in touch with ShipBob about our warehouse management software to see if we can help your business, discover if we’re a mutual fit, and get a pricing quote.
