BlendJet is the #1 selling brand of blenders direct-to-consumer with millions of customers around the world, in over 30,000 retail locations distributed across 38 countries.
While BlendJet may be known for creating the world’s first portable blender, the company’s mission spans larger to help people live longer, healthier lives. BlendJet’s story begins when Ryan Pamplin had an unexpected traumatic injury and nearly lost his life. Nutritious smoothies were the key to Ryan’s year-long recovery, and after reuniting with his friend, John Zheng, the two founded BlendJet in 2017 to help people enjoy smoothies on-the-go any time, anywhere.
This year Nimble took over BlendJet’s US e-commerce fulfillment and delivery operations, ramping up to full volumes in just under 6 weeks starting in October 2023 while meeting peak SLAs. Ryan Pamplin, BlendJet Founder and CEO spoke highly of Nimble saying, “Nimble is disrupting logistics, in a good way, and giving us an amazing edge.”
The Logistics Challenges Faced By High Growth Brands
Since its inception, BlendJet’s sales have soared. After just two years, the company had over a million customers in over 100 countries. BlendJet was previously fulfilling all orders from its own warehouse, but they’ve faced challenges of keeping up with the demand and quickly outgrew their facility.
BlendJet chose to partner with Nimble, a next generation 3PL building a network of fully autonomous fulfillment centers, to achieve several key goals:
- Build a resilient Supply Chain: With the number of monthly orders multiplying and a customer promise for fast 2-day delivery, BlendJet needed to expand its existing capacity to find a 3PL partner that could manage warehouse expansion while navigating industry wide labor and space challenges.
- Minimize fulfillment and delivery costs: To keep prices low for customers while offering 2-day delivery BlendJet needed to find a solution that leverages automation to pick and pack orders with maximum labor efficiency. Additionally to reduce shipping costs and delivery times, BlendJet needed a 3PL partner that could fulfill and ship orders from a network of multiple warehouses where inventory was placed closer to end consumers around the country.
- Build a logistics solution that enables growth: With 90% of consumers expecting 2-3 day delivery and a playbook to grow through celebrity endorsements and franchise partnerships BlendJet needed a solution that could handle frequent order volume volatility with sales creating orders spikes upwards of 5X. This type of volatility typically challenges traditional 3PLs who need to staff up and down accordingly weeks in advance, costing money in training and human resources while also limiting flexibility in what the marketing teams can do.
- Expand product offerings: BlendJet’s continuous innovation led to a wider array of product offerings, which required a higher SKU count and a more complex fulfillment system including potential for SKU proliferation through a marketplace with joint fulfillment.
- Contribute to sustainability efforts: Blendjet aimed to reduce its environmental footprint by placing inventory as close as possible to customers and leveraging more eco-friendly warehouse facilities.
Finding the Missing Ingredient
Co-founder and CEO Ryan Pamplin selected Nimble as he believed in the company’s mission to build end-to-end autonomous logistics and disrupt the e-commerce fulfillment industry. When he and his team visited Nimble fulfillment facilities, he quickly realized that no other provider offers access to the same level of robotics and technology. “With growing sales and increasing SKU variety, BlendJet needed a more scalable fulfillment operation. Investing many millions in warehouse automation was not within scope, and cheaper alternatives didn’t create enough ROI,” said Ryan. “With Nimble’s robotic 3PL warehouses, BlendJet can access state of the art warehouse AI robotics without having to make any cap-ex investments.”
BlendJet has full confidence that Nimble can support its growth year over year. High storage density (around 4X the storage capacity of equally sized manually operated warehouses), continuous investment in network expansion, and access to tens of millions in growth capital to fund scaling robotic pickers and packers allow Nimble to offer clients unprecedented storage and throughput capacity.
The Benefits of Fully Autonomous 3PL Fulfillment
Since joining forces, BlendJet was able to seamlessly transition from a single West Coast node to a nationwide multi-node fulfillment network. Nimble’s Implementation Team supported BlendJet throughout the onboarding process taking over all US e-commerce operations and fully ramping operations in 6 weeks - just in time for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales frenzy. Even with sales increasing by 5x-10x and reaching several tens of thousands of products sold days, BlendJet customers received their orders on average in 2-3 days and before the Christmas holiday for all orders placed all the way up through December 22.
Through partnering with Nimble, BlendJet can also now focus their core resources on creating new products customers love while letting Nimble’s robotic warehouses pick, pack and fulfill customer orders ultimately providing a best in class customer experience across the board.
Onward and Upward
With BlendJet’s portable blender already being sent into space, even the sky is not the limit. In 2024 and beyond BlendJet plans to continue launching new products while expanding their bustling marketplace ecosystem and product offerings. Nimble is excited to support BlendJet on their journey to becoming a truly iconic consumer brand.
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