Black Bear Fulfillment was established in 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. In hindsight, it was fortuitous timing, according to Blunsom.
“We weren't sure what was going to happen. We wondered if people would stop buying given jobs were being slashed. We had a monthly rent bill of $4,000 at that time, and we didn’t know if we’d be able to pay it.
But, as it turns out, ecommerce went through the roof during that time, and for the team at Black Bear, this timing was a massive boost to their growth.
“We now pay 10 times that rent, and we don’t even think about it. That’s how much the business has grown in the last three years.
“We simply couldn't do business without Mintosft.”
Minstoft has saved the business thousands of hours and countless dollars
“The automation functionality makes everything a breeze. The solution is so good that I could quite literally grab someone off the street and have them trained up to be picking and packing within an hour.”
“We didn’t use the automated batching feature for quite a while and every single day at morning, lunch and in the afternoon, someone on the team would sit down and make up all the batches that had come in. That was three hours of someone’s day, every single day. Across a week, month and year, that’s huge. That’s a third of someone’s work time taken up with manual tasks we were able to automate with Mintsoft. We’ve saved tonnes of time and money just with that one feature.”
“The support is also great, and especially when we first started and were getting things set up and off the ground. We had a small team of developers working on our implementation, and they were brilliant.”
With Mintsoft from the start
After having been exposed to Minstoft as a customer of a UK business, the Black Bear team knew what they wanted and what they could expect from the solution.
“We didn’t move from one solution to another. We launched with Mintsoft and never even considered a different option because it has a lot of features that the competitors on the market simply don’t have. That’s especially true from a client perspective, in that it provides greater visibility and better functionality.
“The ability to enable and support self-service takes the pressure of our teams and allows them to work on higher value tasks, as opposed to solving issues that customers can now manage themselves.
“It is so user friendly, you can log into the live portal and just do whatever needs to be done. Mintsoft has been awesome from day one.”
“I would recommend Mintsoft to anyone – except my competitors,” Black Bear Owner Operator, Mack Blunsom.