From the greenhouse to your doorstep, Easyplant is the brand for beginners and green thumbs alike, delivering beautiful indoor plants potted in low-maintenance, self-watering ceramic pots.
We sat down with Rachel Katz, Plants Operations Manager at Mixtiles, Easyplant’s parent company, to dive into the “tremendous” value of using PrettyDamnQuick. Topics include:
- Generating major savings on operations, fulfillment, manpower, and handling our special requirements with PDQ’s flexible software platform.
- How traditional fulfillment fails to handle precious and perishable products
- PDQ’s effortless, nearly instantaneous onboarding flow
“PDQ has truly saved the day for Easyplant in so many ways: delivery promise, operational flexibility and savings, dedicated development and support resources, and more.”
Phase 1: Fulfillment Pain Points
Prior to onboarding with PrettyDamnQuick, Easyplant delivered all of its products through its own fulfillment center, powered by dated/legacy in-house software that integrated with Shopify.
Rachel can easily recall the greatest pain points of her prior system
- Teams had little visibility into orders and fulfillment statuses
- New software features and requirements were met with difficulty or flat-out rejection
- Lacked the much-needed flexibility and specialized needs for handling living, fragile products
- Needed to use multiple systems to manage the order to fulfillment process.
- Difficulty managing orders that need to be fulfilled from multiple warehouses (split orders)
Shipping live contents like plants understandably make for a highly dynamic and challenging fulfillment environment — one that couldn’t normally be served by any software platform or provider.
“Because our fulfillment needs are so diverse and multivariable, we needed the kind of software that was robust yet flexible enough to handle our changing needs.”
Phase 2: Discovery & Onboarding
They were eventually introduced to PDQ through a mutual contact in the Tel Aviv tech scene.
Rachel describes getting in touch to talk through Easyplant’s specific struggles and unmet needs regarding fulfillment. At that point in time, it was winter in the United States.
The weather there was simply too harsh and frozen for any of their plants (AKA their precious product) to survive shipping to many of their targeted delivery areas.
After that first conversation, the PDQ team “jumped at the opportunity and went all-in” to begin developing a tailored solution that would prevent any further revenue loss.
“Plug-and-Play” Onboarding
In terms of ramp time, PDQ’s software was, in Rachel’s words, “essentially ready to meet our needs right out of the box, quick and easy” — but not without taking the proper measures.
- Before rollout, both company teams conducted thorough software testing in tandem.
- Throughout Easyplant’s early weeks on the system, PDQ’s legion of developers was prepared to intervene at the sight of any hiccups.
"It was ready for us straight out of the box. It’s basically plug-and-play if you use Shopify. They turned it on, and we were off to the races."
Benefit #1: Meet Your Delivery Promise
Rachel calls PDQ's delivery promise feature the foremost improvement to the Easyplant buyer experience. Customers can easily view their most efficient delivery options via an intuitive User Interface.
Meanwhile, on the fulfillment end, the Easyplant team can now:
- View delivery promises for every purchase in accurate chronological order in one view
- Receive AI-powered suggestions to maintain delivery deadlines at the lowest price
This is especially impactful during high-volume holidays with sensitive deadlines, such as Mother’s Day or Christmas, because Easyplant remains a desirable product for gifting.
Competing with the Amazons of Fulfillment
Returning to the challenge of shipping live plants in winter, Rachel breaks down one example of the PDQ team going to great lengths to ensure their delivery promises:
- Easyplant had been stalling shipments due to freezing regional temperatures.
- They detected windows of time when it was warm enough to deliver.
- PDQ worked to fulfill as many orders as possible within this modified workflow.
According to Rachel, these efforts helped Easyplant drastically cut down the number of orders put on hold due to the uncontrollable factor of the weather.
Above all, she commends PDQ for driving user retention via reliable, rapid fulfillment, especially in an era where two-day shipping has become the default consumer expectation.
“We hold ourselves closely to the metric of delivery promise. With PDQ, we’ve been able to drive customer retention by meeting those deadlines all the time.”
Benefit #2: Optimized Fulfillment Ops
PDQ has also implemented beneficial changes to optimize operations and production flows within Easyplant's fulfillment centers.
For instance, the PDQ platform allows users to group orders and organize them in a wide variety of ways, for example: by delivery promise, product type or name, box type, or virtually any criteria.
Easyplant has since significantly optimized product lines by running all large plant orders at once, followed by medium plants, then small ones – resulting in far quicker workflow than running a mixed batch.
The optimization process is continuous and PDQ allows us to continually make adjustments to reduce operational costs and increase profitability.
"The operational workflow changes PDQ implemented for us have made worlds of difference in successfully optimizing our production process."
Benefit #3: Dedicated Team Support
Beyond the onboarding process, Rachel emphasizes PDQ’s dedicated, highly responsive client and developer support services. The team is available by chat, slack, email, or by phone – they are always reachable.
Easyplant’s fulfillment teams have reached out with questions, issues, and ideas that have been met with rapid, thoughtful replies at all times — an unfortunate rarity in the eCom tooling space.
This degree of responsiveness is “extremely important” to Easyplant internally for two reasons:
- Nature of the Business — They handle temperamental, fragile products. This requires readiness and willingness to assist from their fulfillment providers at (almost) all hours.
- Software Savings — Through PDQ’s fully client-dedicated software team, Easyplant has gleaned “tremendous savings” on their optimized fulfillment projects.
"The PDQ team goes all-in on software to provide clients with what they need. I couldn’t even quantify how much money Easyplant has saved on that front."
Benefit #4: Client-Driven Feature Rollouts
As one of PDQ's first partners, the Easyplant team became de facto design collaborators, frequently providing insights and feedback that would become actual features.
The PDQ team has turned these suggestions into both tailored software for Easyplant and baseline platform features to benefit all client companies. Rachel illustrates the process:
- An Easyplant team member shoots over the suggestion through Slack or WhatsApp.
- PDQ’s team evaluates feedback for potential solutions for Easyplant and the market.
- The two teams meet to lay out ideas, a timeline, and potential obstacles to development.
"At this point, the PDQ team hasn’t said ‘no’ to any improvements I’ve proposed. They’re incredibly receptive to feedback and enthusiastic about implementing it."
How PrettyDamnQuick Delivered Outsized Value
In Rachel’s words, any brand looking to improve fulfillment ops should use PDQ for 3 reasons:
- Low Lift
If your brand is already using Shopify, PDQ’s software will essentially be an out-of-the-box, plug-and-play solution. Almost zero development resources are needed for implementation.
- Modernized Flexibility
Like most modern eCom infrastructure tools, PDQ gives a much-needed facelift to its category.
Any DTC brand like Easyplant that requires flexibility and customization will be satisfied by PDQ's options for optimization — especially after coming off legacy shipping tools.
- Pick & Choose Your Service
Finally, Rachel highlights PDQ's feature for leveraging multiple delivery services rather than having to limit yourself by sticking to one carrier.
"Working with PDQ has been a tremendous experience. They continue to seek out and execute our ideas for how the platform can better meet fulfillment needs.”
