Behind the Box: How MTB's Big Move Is Paying Off

This post was written by Ross Gordon, CEO and Founder of Mystery Tackle Box.MTB Nation! It’s time we let you behind the curtain. You share your stories with us every day - the ups and downs of your experiences using the products we send you, so we are returning the favor by sharing stories of our owns ups and downs with our new blog series called “Behind the Box.”For our first post, we’ll be sharing an update on our fulfillment process, specifically, a behind the scenes look at our recent fulfillment center move.

What Is Fulfillment, Anyway?

For a company like ours “Fulfillment” encompasses several functions:

Receiving products at our warehouse
Packing boxes
Labelling boxes
Shipping boxes
Managing inventory

Building MTB is both fun and challenging thanks to the incredibly passionate response from our members. Membership growth is great because we can increase the rate at which we improve the MTB experience, but rapid growth also puts strain on our fulfillment.

A New Home For MTB

We’re guessing you didn’t notice, but the return address on your box recently changed. In April, we moved to a bigger fulfillment center with fancy machinery to help meet our deadlines at ever-increasing shipment sizes. Our old fulfillment center was doing everything by hand and we could no longer pack and label fast enough.Here’s a few shots to give you a better visual of the new center in action:Packed Mystery Tackle Boxes:

Labelling Mystery Tackle Boxes:

May: Getting Up And Running

These improvements will allow us to build and ship more boxes quicker than ever before. However, big changes come with risk and unexpected surprises, and our transition was no exception. Our new partner handled the first two transition steps with ease. They received and sorted our inventory, organized as it arrived (no small feat when you are moving thousands of boxes), and packed our May boxes on the new packing lines faster than we’ve ever packed before.

Our First Challenge

We encountered our first curveball when the labeling lines weren’t ready and we had to label our boxes by hand. By itself, this development was disappointing, but not the end of the world. However, our shipping partner informed us that there was another problem - our labels wouldn’t scan. Some quick investigation revealed that our printers had cut off the last few bars on the bar codes. We had essentially given our shipping partner 8 digits of 10-digit phone numbers and asked them to make thousands of calls. No one noticed, because normal human beings can’t read bar codes.Our shipping partner returned the boxes for relabeling, causing a delay. We know how much most of you look forward to getting your boxes promptly (because you share so well on social media), so we take even minor delays personally. But, we cowboy-ed up, got the May boxes back out, took a deep breath, and started focusing on June.

June: It’s Alive!

In the weeks that followed, we visited our fulfillment center to get the labeling lines ready and were super pumped to get the green light. Watching the boxes fly by on our lines was a magical moment, reminding us just how many of you are out there. We high-fived and went home thrilled.

More Surprises And Detective Work

But new technology launches are susceptible to bugs, and two emerged after our run. First, our system stopped recording tracking numbers towards the end of our shipment. We knew the boxes had gone out because they weren’t in inventory, but we had no way of sending tracking numbers to some members whose boxes had already gone out. So, a few of you received boxes without ever getting the usual confirmation email. This is why.Second, the boxes move fast through the line. Fast is good, unless it is faster than the label printer can manage. We discovered that the printer would occasionally not queue up the next label quickly enough and the same label was printed twice. As much as we love the idea of surprising some of our beloved customers with an extra box, this meant that an equal number of customers were not going to receive anything. We fixed the problem and sent replacements, but were again bummed out by the delays.

July: Changes Paying Off

First MTB box!! Managed to hook a couple piggies

A post shared by Nick Lively (@nick_lively) on Jul 11, 2017 at 7:26pm PDT

With two shipments under our belt, all the wrinkles have been ironed out and we are gearing up for an awesome July. If more surprises pop up, you can bet that we won’t rest until each one has been beaten into submission. We’ve got some exciting new experiences set for launch if all goes to plan – all powered by our new fulfillment center. So, stay tuned for some big announcements and for more editions of Behind the Box!