Don’t Sweat Shipping - Fulfillrite’s Brandon Ensures Smooth Sailing

George: 0:00
Hi there. My name is George and I help independent creators launch their products and games. On this podcast, those creators share their journey from an idea to an actual product and everything in between. Today’s guest is not a traditional founder or creator. Today’s guest is Brandon Rollins. He is the director of marketing at FulfillRite. FulfillRight is a fulfillment company in the United States specialized in fulfilling crowdfunding campaigns, especially in the games category. In this episode, you’ll learn all about crowdfunding fulfillment from the experts, including tips, tricks, and mistakes you should avoid when shipping your rewards. Welcome Brandon.

Brandon: 0:36
Thank you very much for having me on. Really appreciate it.

George: 0:39
Yeah, absolutely. I was on your podcast a couple of months ago and I thought that was great. And I’m happy to have you on. We have this new format. You’re the second guest in this format where we have experts on not just creators last month We had Tim Chuan who does. Photography for crowdfunding campaigns. And now we have you and everything about fulfillment, which is very exciting because this is where a lot of mistakes happen. And so we’re going to cover. But before we get into what people need to know, can you give us a short introduction about yourself and what fulfill right is and what you do there at the company?

Brandon: 1:11
Sure. Rollins. Of course, I’m here on behalf of fulfill, right? Which is in. e commerce and crowdfunding order fulfillment company. I’m the director of marketing and before I got into this, I was doing my own board game Kickstarter stuff too. That’s actually how I ended up meeting the company. But as for FulfillRite, what we’ve been doing is we’ve been shipping out crowdfunding campaigns since close to the beginning of crowdfunding as a concept. And it’s honestly a lot of fun every time we do it.

George: 1:44
And so what makes a company like FulfillRite that does. Crowdfunding fulfillment. What makes that different from just good old e commerce fulfillment?

Brandon: 1:53
It’s funny. I was actually talking to another guy about the, another fulfillment center based in the UK about this. And he said something interesting here that I’ll just repeat. And that is. It’s actually really there’s a huge difference between fulfilling steady e commerce orders and crowdfunding ones where you get a whole bunch all at once and you’re expected to get it out in a week or two. So you’ve got to have the infrastructure to handle that kind of boom and bust that comes with crowdfunding.

George: 2:19
Yeah. And that’s why I think it’s great that we’re talking to you today because this is in general, something creators should really know if you’re Speaking to potential partners, service providers, whether it be fulfillment companies or ad agencies, they need to know about crowdfunding specifically, because like you said, fulfilling for just an e commerce brand on an ongoing basis is very different from fulfilling a crowdfunding campaign where everything comes all at once. So it’s great that we have you here now. You mentioned that you used to have your own. At kickstarters your own campaigns how did that what did that look like back in the day?

Brandon: 2:53
So that’s a strange story, but i’ll try and keep it brief pretty much when I was 22 actually I was looking for just a business idea to run with when I got out of college I decided to turn this like Childhood card game that I had made into an actual physical product. So I ended up doing that kind of stumbling into Kickstarter. Cause that was the kind of, that was just the thing that you did. And through that process, learn what it takes to make a game and what it takes to get it up on Kickstarter and what, and just a product up on Kickstarter in general, and what it takes to get that all shipped. I squeaked over the goal and did this in like the, in such a poorly thought out way, but it like managed to squeak over that goal and get it shipped out anyway. Ended up making another game after that, but blogged about the experience as I was doing it, just making how to articles on How to do your first game pretty much. And that’s actually how fulfill right. Found me the CEO reached out to me to do a guest post collaboration. And then I got a little bit of contract work and things snowballed from there.

George: 3:59
Wow. That is such a great tip. I think like for everyone out there who’s just doing an interesting thing or doing a crowdfunding campaign, just blog about your experience. Because I think that’s what Jamie Stegmaier did as well. And that, that is like a whole. Sort of side business for him. Just people, supporting his blog. That is super cool. And that those first couple of campaigns, how were those being fulfilled?

Brandon: 4:20
Oh gosh. Okay. So that very first one, what I did so I shipped that one out of my house or out of my apartment at the time. And I had my brother’s help for a little bit of this, but I mostly did a lot of the fulfillment on my own. And what happened is I actually got Print Ninja, which was the manufacturer I chose for this card game, to send it all to my, as close to my apartment as I could get it. So they dropped in off at a a warehouse in North Georgia, right over the state line. I’m in Chattanooga. So we both drove there in our beater cars. Like I was driving a 90 Camry in 2016, if that tells you anything. So 1990 and we loaded up our cars and both of them, the backs of them were just sagging from where we had. So much card stock in there. Cause that’s quite heavy. We drove about as fast as we could manage with that load safely unloaded all those boxes into my apartment. It took up the entire living room, which is like remarkably was remarkably big at the time. Cause real estate is like not that expensive in the South. Anyway, all the boxes everywhere. I had to manually, because I did six cards, six decks of cards, and they were all different SKUs. Manually picked and packed all of it, put them in padded mailers, and then took a box of a hundred of these padded mailers to USPS and just Dropped it off and they had to accept it like it’s a rule They have to accept it if you’ve got the postage I think It’s probably might still be the case who knows honestly probably because of people like me who’ve done that but Ended up doing that in a handful of ones that had to go internationally. I sent them pretty much the same way and then paid people back for the customs after the fact. Yeah,

George: 6:17
And that’s how you do it when you’re 22 and you’re doing your first campaign, Yeah, but that’s not how we want to see it when you’re doing a bigger campaign or when you’re at any age over 22 so we are going to talk about how we evolve from that and how folks Who don’t want to pick things up in their Camry or who are even international who may not even be based in the u. s I should do fulfillment with a company like Fulfillrite? For those folks listening who are thinking about their first campaign and they actually have no idea about this entire process. Can you talk us through what happens between a game or a product being made by a factory and it’s done and it leaves the factory door to hitting the customer’s doorstep. What are the steps that happen in between?

Brandon: 7:05
Yeah, that’s a great question. And there is so much that happens in between somebody placing a large manufacturing order and it actually getting out to customers. And I’m just going to, for simplicity’s sake, assume that you’ve got a totally complete product. Let’s say a totally complete game, because we were talking about games earlier because if you don’t, you might actually have some back and forth with the manufacturer on making something that is manufacturable. But if you’ve got that all Sorted and once those funds clear from Kickstarter or Indiegogo game found What you do is you ask the manufacturer to start the bulk order and that can take Weeks for them to make or months depending on what it is that you’re having made once that finishes up You’ve got to get that out of the manufacturer’s factory or shop to where you are And if you’re manufacturing overseas like a lot of folks What that means is you’re going to have to book freight You In one way or another, even if it’s not a huge heavy load, those, all that cargo’s got to end up on a boat or a plane or a train or a truck, or some combination of these four to get to some place where they can be shipped out to individual backers. So that’s the freight process. And there’s a whole lot of back and forth negotiation that goes with that as well. And technical terms with that. Once you get the freight booked, if you ship it by sea, which is generally regarded as the cheapest way to go and probably the best fit for most campaigns, you’ve got to wait another. Often several weeks for that to go from one place to another. Especially if you’re shipping from like China to the east coast of the U S it’s got to go all the way around the world at 40 miles an hour. These are not like airplanes. They don’t just go 600 miles an hour. They go like 40 miles an hour across the globe and then through the canal, which is a whole thing. And then they’ve got to be picked up at a port and carried off by a truck. Of course, before that happens, you got to clear customs too.

George: 9:09
And just so folks understand what a fulfillment company like FulfillRite does, that is not what you guys do, right? That’s a different thing.

Brandon: 9:17
This is all actually before it gets sent to a fulfillment center. But once that gets, once that lands in a port somewhere, you’ve got to clear customs, which means whichever country you’re sending those goods to, you’ve got to make sure that you’re complying with all the rules. And all the laws like that. It’s actually legal to import your product. They’re easy to overlook. And then you’ve got to pay probably some taxes on that as well. And maybe some additional costs for any exams that are done by customs agencies, which honestly, to know exactly what you’re looking at there, you have to have an expert with that because that’s not my area of expertise there anyway. But once you clear customs and once it gets to the warehouse, ultimately this is where FulfillRite or a company like FulfillRite comes in. That truck will pull up with all that inventory there. Workers go in there either unloading the boxes by hand, or maybe with a forklift, if it’s a different kind of situation, take all of that, find a place in the warehouse to store it. And then when it’s time to actually send out those individual orders check their computer system, figure out where it’s stored, pick the items off the shelves, put them in a package, put on postage, and then drop that off in the mail to be picked up in bulk at the end of the day or multiple times a day. It’s a lot.

George: 10:40
It is a lot. And so that last part again is also not what a company like FulfillRite does, right? You hand that over to UPS or some kind of ground transport company. So really to summarize it, is first you have a really big shipment, a big and slow shipment that goes from somewhere some country to a port in the United States, then it goes to FulfillRite where it gets organized. And so those big pallets get broken up into individual packages and individually labeled for who they should go to, and then you guys hand off the individual packages To, the postman, so to say. So really what it is that you guys do is you unpack big orders and you turn those into smaller orders and make sure that every individual person gets their piece from that huge container. Is that right?

Brandon: 11:31
That’s exactly what it is a home for all the goods that you have, and then a way to break that into small enough parts to send out to the backers.

George: 11:39
Yeah, because you can’t leave it in the port, right?

Brandon: 11:42
No, you can’t leave it there.

George: 11:44
No, exactly. Okay, great So that’s the process. End to end now this is It seems like there’s a lot of moving parts about this and one of the great things but also one of the hard things about crowdfunding is often crowdfunding our first time creators They’re often folks who have an idea and they want to bring this to life and this is the first time that they’re You In the product business. So what are some of the common mistakes that you see people that those who are listening to this podcast right now are not going to make after hearing you say this?

Brandon: 12:17
Oh it’s funny. I actually just did a content marketing piece on this. I’ve got a draft of it up here. Yeah, it like, and this is like evergreen advice. I’ve written probably 10 different versions of this because it doesn’t change over the years. Number one is just setting the wrong timeline from the get go. Because if you go out on Kickstarter or anywhere and you say I’m going to have this shipped in four months. And it’s actually going to take you eight months. It doesn’t matter how perfectly your process goes from there. If you publicly communicate the wrong deadlines, people are going to hold you to that, whether or not that’s fair or realistic or not. The best way around that is to basically contact your manufacturer, get in touch with some freight folks and fulfillment folks, get all the timetables they say they need from there. Okay. And then pad each of those by like 25%. And that’s how you get a realistic timetable. And that might be longer than other campaigns are putting out there for shipping the same kind of product. But I think it’s generally better to put a conservative estimate out there and ship on time, or maybe a month behind.

George: 13:27
Yeah, under promise, over deliver. It’s such a cliche, but it applies here as well. Okay, so that’s the first, that’s a great first one. What else do we have?

Brandon: 13:36
Another big one is mismanaging freight and customs, which is basically, really the worst thing you can do is just not think about this stuff at all in advance. You can hire freight brokerage firms for this, or just find one. You can Google freight brokerage firm and just talk to a few people on the phone and see if anybody’s a good fit. Or you can try booking yourself through marketplaces like Freightos. It’s. Like booking a hotel or a flight, but there’s a lot more questions on there But it’s self service like you can do it. I’ve done it It’s about how much risk and ownership you want to have really but whatever you do You just need to know how you’re gonna get that freight booked in advance and you need to schedule it Like pretty much as soon as you start the manufacturing process Um, it’s let’s take a booking a flight as an analogy. I’m flying out to Salt Lake in a couple of weeks for a conference. I’ve already got my ticket booked, so it’s not expensive. I don’t have to worry about getting the right seat, but if it were tomorrow and I didn’t have a ticket booked, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to, I would, I couldn’t guarantee I could get a flight out of chat, honestly, in the morning. I might have to go through all kinds of hoops to actually get there.

George: 14:49
So just like airlines these freight ships, they fill up is what you’re saying.

Brandon: 14:55
Exactly. There’s limited capacity. You don’t want to leave it sitting in the factory for a while because they might actually start to charge you for taking up their space too.

George: 15:04
Yeah. Yeah. That’s, I think that’s a great point. I think everyone charges you for storing your stuff. And if it’s not their job to store your stuff. It’s even it’s more expensive. So factories will start charging you for it If it sits in the port for too long you get charged. So that’s a very good point

Brandon: 15:24
Another thing you’ll want to consider is basically who has a responsibility for different parts of that freight shipping process Like the manufacturer can do part of it. You can do part of it And there’s so many ways you can do this. You can have them handle everything for you. Basically they ship the whole thing, including getting it through customs. And all you have to worry about is just like giving them maybe some information if they ask for it. Delivery duties paid. Most hands off for you. The other extreme is XW, E X W, which is X works, which is literally the manufacturer does nothing. You have to coordinate a somebody to go pick it up from their place and you take complete ownership of the inventory from there. And there’s some stuff in the middle too. You just have to agree on that and figure out what you want to do in advance.

George: 16:13
So that’s another thing that I think folks can potentially make a mistake on in terms of not discussing that with the factory, right? Because folks will discuss with the factory about the manufacturing. But what you’re saying is you also have to discuss the shipping and the handing off of the goods with the factory. That’s a great point.

Brandon: 16:30
Yeah. And If you’re getting to the point where you’ve already selected a manufacturer, this might not necessarily be a deal breaker to make you switch. But personally, I would ask them what their policy is before you sign on with anybody, because there’s a huge difference between 10, 000 to make 1, 000 units DDP shipping, and 10, 000 to make 1, 000 units XW shipping, because you’re going to end up paying a lot more for the freight there.

George: 16:59
Interesting. Okay. And we’ll link some links in the show notes to these terms, because if you’re hearing this for the first time, that’s that’s a lot of terminology. So we’ll have some show notes.

Brandon: 17:09
It’s super granular. And I’ll say you don’t actually have to know all this stuff in advance. The point is just make the time to decide what you want to do. That’s the actual key way to avoid the mistake. The other big one is just make sure that you are actually following customs laws. Look up how much you might owe in tax too, that’s a big one, and set aside that money. But if there’s like really one thing you’ve got to get right there, just follow the import laws. For example board games in particular, there are some labeling requirements where if you do not put certain labels on them, and they have got an age that’s under 14 or 13 in some countries that it might actually get turned away by customs agencies because that gets into children’s toy territory, and children’s toys are subject to a whole lot more regulations and other things. It’s not hard to comply. You just have to know that it’s something to look out for.

George: 18:04
Yeah, that’s a great point. And that’s something you cannot fix. If the labels aren’t there and it lands in the port there’s no way back from there. Yeah. Okay. Any other big mistakes or have we scared folks enough?

Brandon: 18:21
The last one is the one that I was touching on earlier with that whole story I gave you, is just trying to ship too many orders on your own. Now, frankly, you can ship some orders on your own. I know that’s that’s a wild thing to say for a fulfillment center to say, but you actually can if you’ve got a couple of hundred orders, It may or may not even make sense to hire another vendor to take care of them. But once you start getting over, say, 500, you’re not talking about an afternoon or two to ship them. You’re talking about multiple days. It’s can you take time off of work? Do you, can you get away from family? commitments. Do you have the patience? Are you honestly going to end up paying more for postage because you don’t get the discounts that fulfillment centers do? All that stuff starts to become a lot more relevant when you’re shipping like 500 or more. So I would say don’t try to ship too many on your own.

George: 19:16
And mistakes. If you’re going to do too much on your own and you don’t have, you guys, as a professional company, you guys have computers and scanners and barcodes and you know where stuff is, but if you’re doing this, your garage and like the error rate is just going to shoot through the roof and then folks get the wrong thing. Speaking of that, by the way, what happens if you guys make a mistake? Who’s responsible for that? If you guys send out the wrong thing, will you guys fix that?

Brandon: 19:42
Yeah, I actually got to think about that. Like. Inaccurate order fulfillment is pretty rare because we’ve got checks and processes to help prevent that stuff from happening. But the company should cover that, send out another copy, reimburse you for the misshipment.

George: 19:56
Exactly. Yeah. And I think, and that’s, I think that’s a great reason why you’d want to. Work with a company like fulfill, right? So you don’t make mistakes and if You know the error rate is low But if a mistake is made you have a company that’s able to deal with that and get it fixed That’s yeah, that’s a great point So it sounds like from these mistakes that what creators should really do when thinking about a crowdfunding campaign is actually work their way backwards. Meaning instead of thinking, how am I going to sell this product on Kickstarter? How am I going to promote it? You should think it lands on someone’s doorstep. What are the, and then what are the steps working backwards? So then where does it come from and where was it stored and how was it shipped there? And basically they should. Work their way back from that and then make sure that they understand the prices of all those steps and the timelines of all those steps. And then you say add 25 percent padding both in time and costs to both of those.

Brandon: 20:59
Yeah, I would say that’s a good way of going about it. If you start from the end, you can work your way backwards pretty easily. You can work your way backwards pretty reliably. We’ll say that. Pretty reliable.

George: 21:10
Yeah. And and you need to know those costs before you get started. Yeah. Okay. Great points. So we know what mistakes to prevent when creators are talking to a company like Fulfillrite or other fulfillment companies. What are the questions that they should ask those companies?

Brandon: 21:28
Okay, questions that you would want to ask an order fulfillment company before signing on with them for crowdfunding in particular. First, make sure they do crowdfunding. That’s a big one, because not everybody does it. And the ones that don’t do that might have a difficult time getting a whole bunch of orders out in a row all at one time, as is typical with crowdfunding. Other ones, of course, you’re going to want to get pricing before you sign on with anybody. And I will say, because every company does it differently, you need to put that in the spreadsheet and figure out total costs of service and not necessarily try to compare rates that have different names. So definitely prices and definitely make sure they do crowdfunding. Some other big ones that you’ll want to look out for is anything you can do To figure out how reliable the service is online at a minimum, try and find reviews and case studies and all that stuff. If you can find some clients to reach out to and get some like some of their unvarnished opinion on that’s even better. But other than that, I would say pretty much any big questions that come to mind, get somebody on the phone at the fulfillment center. Once you’ve narrowed it down to a handful of choices and just ask them the questions and make sure that you get sensible answers to them. There’s a lot of important questions you can ask, but one of the things that you really need to make sure of is that you’re going to get clear communication and clear answers and very solid, reliable data before you proceed with anyone.

George: 23:00
Yeah, that’s such a good point. Also just the speed of communication, how complete are their answers? Does it take them a really long time to find the answer to what you think would be a simple question? Those are. Great indicators of potential future issues. Yeah.

Brandon: 23:16
Yeah. You want to make sure they answer their emails and calls because the thing is if it’s slow during the sales process, it is not going to get better once you’ve signed on.

George: 23:25
That is so true. That is so true. Any other things to look out for? Important questions. So we’ve had, does the company do crowdfunding? What are the prices? What is the process? And then finding some reviews or finding other folks who can be a reference to that company.

Brandon: 23:43
I would say in your general research of question asking and looking online, one of the, and even like digging into subreddits and that kind of stuff, probably one thing you want to look out for. That isn’t even a question you can particularly ask somebody. It’s just something to look for any indication of delays and slowdowns and obviously slow communication, but slow shipments are usually a sign of a whole bunch of other things. Like slow shipments in and of itself as a problem, period. It will cost you money. It will irritate backers. It might impact the long term revenue possibilities of your company. But if the shipments are going out slow, that’s a capacity problem, a personnel problem, a communication problem, it’s something else, there’s something deeper and bigger going on there because pretty much every order fulfillment center says and really wants it to be true that they are shipping things out. Pretty soon right after they get them.

George: 24:42
Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah,

Brandon: 24:45
that grumbling online is the kind of thing that’s it’s more objective and empirical and it’s less squishy. If you need something that you really should look for, that’s a sign of other things.

George: 24:57
Is there a way for folks who back campaigns frequently to know if a package that they received from a campaign was fulfilled by Fulfillrite? Or is that, will you never be able to see that?

Brandon: 25:09
I think you actually would be able to see that on the label. Like it’s been a minute since I’ve gotten a package from the fulfill rate warehouse myself. But like the last time I did it, it said Fulfillrite on the return label. So yeah, you should be able to know.

George: 25:21
Yeah, so if you back a lot of campaigns just don’t throw away the label immediately look at the label see which company you see on there um, and if you Were happy with that shipment if it came fast or you continue to see that same label That might be a good one

Brandon: 25:36
You know Come to think of it. Even if the name’s not on the label, that address will be, and the address is going to match up to another company.

George: 25:45
Yep, there we go. That’s a great way to do research. If you got packages that you were super happy with, pick up who that was. Good chance. It’ll be Fulfillrite. Um, But that’s a great way to, yeah, see which companies fulfill fast. To end this episode do you have any campaigns, projects that you guys worked on? Where you just felt like that was such an epic project and it has just such a great fulfillment story to it that, You can share with us.

Brandon: 26:13
So because I’m working remotely, I’ll often get pictures of stuff that’s being shipped out from the warehouse. I’m a little jealous when I see, the latest board game and all that stuff shared on social media and all that. But I will tell you that not actually touching the inventory myself, the thing that perpetually stands out to me as being really interesting is Calamity Ware. This client has been working with FulfillRite for 10 years now, actually, because it’s 2024. So they’ve been working with them since 2014. And I don’t know how many campaigns this company is up to now. It’s got to be like 70 or something. The concept is so simple. You know, The white and blue plates, the fancy china that people tend to collect. They do that, but with a humorous twist. It’s not like the normal things you see on there. It’s like volcanoes and robots and just silly stuff. Wild, weird, creative details. And so It’s interesting to help somebody who’s an artist, who’s doing interesting stuff, who’s selling something like that. It’s interesting because of how many campaigns there are and how much people want these. It’s also interesting because it’s a fragile item too, which makes it tricky to ship. You’ve got to think about that as well. It always stands out to me because you guys do

George: 27:26
all of their campaigns.

Brandon: 27:28
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As far as I know, yeah, we do all of them or the vast majority of them, if it’s not all of them.

George: 27:35
So there you go. If you have a fulfillment company that is. Willing to take on fragile, expensive plates and pottery for 10 years and delivers that without breaking it. I think you that’s another great way to, to just rank fulfillment companies and assess them. Do they. Handle fragile things and do they arrive not broken?

Brandon: 27:57
Yeah, and honestly, it’s like we don’t take a whole lot of fragile just to be just to tell you the truth But you know early on in the warehouse years Of course you like a lot of those you take who you can get and then you slowly refine your niche over time But we don’t turn away a long time client for that kind of reason too. It’s we just know it’s fragile, we make a note of it, even though it’s outside of process, we make it work.

George: 28:21
Awesome. I love it. Brandon, thank you so much. You have given us a ton of useful tips. A lot of this will be in the show notes, links to FulfillWrite, links to some of those terms. That you heard. And if folks have any questions you guys have a great blog. I love your blog. You’re the one that writes it. Great tips and tricks. And I also know you guys have a great sales team that folks love speaking to. If you’re listening to this and you want to learn more, or you want to start planning and get your costs in order, Don’t hesitate to reach out to their sales team because they’re great. And they’re happy to work with you to figure out how this process is going to work. So Brandon, thank you so much. And I hope we can do this again sometime.

Brandon: 29:01
Yeah, absolutely. That would be fun. Thank you for your time.