December 2022: Fulfilment Update & Review

Hey folks! 👋

In the time honoured tradition, we thought we’d throw together some stats for y’all to enjoy as we round off 2022 and start looking ahead to the New Year.

This blog will come in two parts, the review section and then an exciting announcement!

Review

Okay, the bit you’re all looking forward to! As a reminder, Swag/Ship/Hack joined forces with Peregrine Coast Press over the summer and since then we’ve been concentrating on offering smaller creators affordable fulfilment and distribution 💥 The figures below are combined between both companies.

We shipped a total of 2,941 packages to 47 countries! 🌐

Unsurprisingly, our top destination was the UK 🇬🇧 but after that came the USA 🇺🇸, Canada 🇨🇦, Germany 🇩🇪 and France 🇫🇷.

Our total volume weighed over 2 metric tonnes! ⚖️

We worked with over 20 individuals and projects 🫂

There are loads of new gigs lined up for 2023, and we can’t wait to help more folks with their fulfilment next year. And, as a bonus, the more folks we work with the more negotiating power we have with Royal Mail, meaning we can make shipping cheaper for everyone we work with. If handling postage sounds like a headache you’d prefer not to deal with, reach out!

Update

When SSH came onboard we inherited some existing processes and gained some documentation, templates and code, but we didn’t codify everything into a manual and our way of working with customers (mailing lists!) remained largely unchanged.

We’ve begun to notice some repetition in the services we’re offering and the emails we’re sending, at the same time as struggling to manage an increasingly busy mailbox! It’s clearly not scalable for fulfilment to rely so heavily on a single person, and so we’ve come up with some ways to improve that.

📃 We’re launching docs.peregrinecoast.press! This will be our knowledge base for folks to understand how we work and what they can expect from us. It (hopefully) gives a good overview and saves some emails! We’re big fans of transparency by default, so this is a natural progression for us and we’ll gradually be adding more details to it over the coming months. The best bit is it’s backed by a Git repository so you’ll be able to see every change we make!

🤖 More automation to some of our fulfilment processes is coming. We want to retain the human touch in all our interactions and to help us achieve that we’ll be introducing new processes and making better use of Google Forms to capture data. This is a prerequisite to further work on this, but Google Forms allows us to get up and running quickly and iterate on feedback.

🔃 Updating our processes and publishing our pricing. Now we have a better idea about how our services work with different customers, we’ll be codifying these in processes (published in the docs!) so everyone knows what to do and how things work. We’re also publishing all our pricing information so folks have a better understanding of what we charge. We’ll be reaching out to existing customers to migrate them onto the new pricing and processes in the New Year.

Phew! That’s a lot.

As always, we really appreciate open and honest feedback on what we’re doing. As a co-op, one of our primary goals is to help other creators and fulfilment is something we know people struggle with (especially when shipping to the UK and EU from around the world) - let us know what we can do better to help you get awesome creations to folks across the globe!

Have a great holiday, and see you on the other side!