Success stories:
Black Bear Fulfillment

Black Bear Fulfillment have a simple mission: To provide the high levels of fulfillment service to Australian customers, which they experienced as a former eCommerce seller in the US and UK. An eCommerce 3PL specialising in smaller consumer items, such as clothing and cosmetics, Black Bear Fulfillment are 100% Australian owned and operated. They are based in Melbourne and employ more than 40 people after launching just three years ago.

Unlike most 3PL’s they aren’t just focused on the logistics and warehousing side of the business, but also, importantly, the customer. Fulfillment is about people as much as it is logistics, and they needed a software solution to help bring this customer-centric vision to life.

The team had their sights set on one solution, and one solution only.

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.”

“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 tones 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.”

After having been exposed to Mintosft 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 off 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.”