Hello Saltbox | Customers, Etc.

Starting a new journey obsessed with member experience

Monday marked my first day as Director of Member Experience at Saltbox. I’m excited to tell you all about it, but first, let me tell you about my first job.

www.saltbox.com

Warehouse

My first real job was at United Supply Company, a wholesale distributor of window fashions. My dad had worked worked there since I was born—he’s still there; hi Dad!—and spending summers in a warehouse without air conditioning became a rite of passage for my brothers and I during high school and well into our college-age years.

While the tasks assigned to me as a young teenager were fairly menial—I think my first job was sorting through old inventory and throwing out bad stock—as I got older I learned the basic operations of a warehouse: unloading trucks, receiving inventory, stocking shelves, and all the steps involved with picking, packing, and shipping orders. Not bad work for a high schooler trying to make a few extra bucks.

In college, I continued to work at United Supply over the summers, but this time working in the office helping my dad with Excel reports that were used to order inventory from China. This is where I got to see the challenges of logistics first hand.

Logistics

United Supply had traditionally ordered their products from companies with distribution in the United States, where lead times for shipping inventory was a matter of days. Now, however, the company was sourcing directly from factories in China, which meant that shipping times were much longer but also more volatile, ranging anywhere from 3 to 6 months.

Ordering large volumes of inventory is challenging enough, but how do you efficiently store it? The previous method of sorting everything by SKU alphanumerically wasn’t working. You might have entire pallets of one popular SKU needing to be placed between two SKUs that didn’t move very quickly. I helped the company rediscover the “bin” field in its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software so that we could rearrange inventory to optimize limited square footage in the warehouse and not have to worry about how it was sorted.

Another fun challenge was balancing inventory across multiple locations. The company had about half a dozen warehouses across the eastern United States, each of which would order one of their product lines directly from the manufacturer. This led to high overstock in one location that couldn’t be matched to demand in another location. To address this problem, I worked on a solution that would analyze the demand for various SKUs by warehouse and then “source” that demand from other nearby United Supply warehouses, eliminating the need to order directly from the manufacturer for an entire month.

The entrepreneur’s dilemma

When I was working on solving logistics problems for United Supply, it was in the context of an established business where I had the flexibility to just squirrel away and think about creative ways to solve problems. Most of the basic logistics problems at been solved and I could focus on the hard problems. Modern entrepreneurs often don’t have that luxury.

Let’s say you come up with a product that you believe people will love. With enough passion and grit, you actually pull it off. You start importing inventory and taking orders. Pretty soon, your garage is overflowing and your dining room has turned into a makeshift UPS shipping station. You’re making enough money to quit your job—and you might actually do it—but where do you go?

Saltbox

You go to Saltbox. Entrepreneur’s today are facing logistics problems they didn’t even know they had when they first started their business. Saltbox is built for them.

I’m already blown away by how much members love being at Saltbox. In the relatively few conversations I’ve had so far internally, I recognize an infectious empathy that spills out to fellow colleagues and members. This is the kind of culture that can create an enduring company obsessed with the experience of its members. I couldn’t be more excited to get started.