Chubbies offers shorts that harken back to the days of old where shorts were the go-to garment for a man’s weekend. These are not to be confused with the dreaded and detestable cargo shorts, Chubbies shorts’ are a comfy, stylish, and liberating way to proudly display the “pants-are-for-work, and I’m not at work right now” mentality. Chubbies has even taken a stand against the plague that are cargo shorts, which you can (& totally should) watch below.
You have such a unique and awesome product, how’d you end up deciding to turn it into a business (and lifestyle)?
Basically, we were tired of looking at old pictures of our dads, uncles, and legends like Tom Selleck, Larry Bird, Arnold, etc. rocking sick, retro shorts and being unable to find anything comparable on the market today. So, we decided to make them ourselves, developing the original Chubbies prototype by drawing inspiration from 80’s style tennis shorts that our boy John McEnroe used to sport. We officially launched the company in the fall of 2011, selling first to our own friends, and then their friends, and then friends of their friends and beyond. We’ve grown like crazy over the past year and a half… turns out, we weren’t the only ones in search of radical, modern-day thigh liberators.
How did you decide on your company’s personality? (meaning your tone of voice, point of view, etc.)
When it comes to brand personality, we try and be as genuine as possible. So much of our brand is rooted in ethos — our character and personality define not only our shorts, but our customers as well – that when you buy a pair of Chubbies, you’re embracing the pants-are-for-work, 5 o’clock-somewhere identity we try to promote. At the end of the day, we’re just a bunch of like-minded dudes trying to dominate the weekend the only way we know how: thighs out. Chubbies isn’t just a shorts company – it’s a lifestyle.
How has ShipStation helped you with your business?
Chubbies has been cranking out shorts at an awesome clip this year and ShipStation has been invaluable in helping us run our fulfillment engine. The level of customization ShipStation allows has been fantastic. We have lots of little quirks that make our fulfillment process uniquely challenging, so being able to mold ShipStation to our needs has been immensely helpful. The more I can automate the order process, the more time I have to manage and oversee larger details of our fulfillment and warehouse. ShipStation has brought us to a place were I no longer fear our exponential growth – I welcome it!
What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?
For our specific product, the ability to batch up to 500 orders at once has been crucial to our fulfillment success. That being said, my favorite ShipStation “feature” is actually the wonderful customer service and support team. Once we began switching over to the software, it was fantastic to have a human on the phone helping me customize ShipStation to our business. Along the way, I’ve had specific questions and requests, and it’s never been any trouble to contact the support team and figure out what we can do. The support team is not only available, they are very action/results-oriented which is something we love here at Chubbies Shorts.
Liberate your (or a loved ones’ legs) with Chubbies shorts! Summer’s here (well, at least the heat is here in Austin), so embrace it and go “Sky’s Out, Thighs Out!”
Want to be featured in our customer spotlight? Let us know!
| Name: Zeb Ahmed, Founder / CEO |
 Some of the decorative wall decals that WallStickersUSA offers. |
| Website: WallStickersUSA.com |
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How did you decide to go into business creating vinyl decals & stickers?
Funny you asked. So my wife and I were expecting our first baby in 2011 and were in the market for nursery decor. The easiest and the simplest way to decorate the nursery seemed to be by using wall stickers and decals available online and at our local retail stores. However when we started looking into it, we were shocked to find steep prices and limited selection of such Wall Stickers. That is when the light bulb went off and we decided to take on the plunge. Due my IT and Sales background and my wife’s creativity, this has been a huge success. We at WallStickersUSA strive to provide extremely affordable wall stickers and decals for not only nurseries and kids’ rooms, but also for the rest of the house.
What’s the most difficult thing about running an online vinyl decal website?
To our surprise, this has been an extremely wonderful and smooth journey. Every business can have its own challenges, but we are lucky to have great employees and partners such as ShipStation around to meet any of these problems. The most difficult thing that we have had to do is to keep up with customer demand and inventory.
A peek at all the poster tubes that WallStickersUSA uses to ship out their decals!
How has ShipStation helped you with your business?
Using other online postage services is great when you only ship a few items a day but when you have hundreds of customer orders to fulfill on a daily basis, it becomes a huge challenge. As customer demand grew, one of the biggest challenges we faced was how to streamline our shipping process. We were referred to ShipStation by one of our other partners and could not thank them enough. Due to the product profile option available with ShipStation and the batch processing, it has literally reduced our shipping time by 75%. Also, availability of multiple carriers and extremely competitive rates, not only is it convenient but also helps us save quite a bit of money.
What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?
Our favorite ShipStation feature would have to be Product Profiles. With this option, you can preset product weights so when the orders are imported, they are ready to be shipped. In addition, we also like the fact that ShipStation has the ability to import orders from variety of data sources and shopping carts.
If you’re looking for a new look for your child’s room, nursery, or just a way to spice up your current decor, make sure that you check out WallStickersUSA today!
Want to be featured in our customer spotlight? Let us know!
A display of Bella Terra Cosmetic’s wide array of mineral makeup & beauty care offerings.
| Name: Helen Deian, Director of Marketing |
Website: bellaterracosmetics.com |
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What is your main motivation for starting up your own cosmetics line?
Bella Terra Mineral Cosmetics was founded in 2007. Our founder is a 30-year veteran of the beauty industry and an innovator that has carved out a niche in the industry, launching ground-breaking products for cosmetics consumers worldwide.
He saw a need to offer an alternative to heavy mask-like makeup that was more of a cover up than a skin enhancer. He developed a mineral blend that looked like a powder but felt just like a cream. When applied to the skin, it looks like one is wearing nothing at all except beautiful radiant, healthy skin. The formula stays on all day without reapplication and it feels as if you are wearing absolutely nothing at all.
Bella Terra is a boutique brand and our hand-made mineral makeup has only 4 pure and raw ingredients derived from Mother Nature – Mica, which is ground up to make colors shimmer; Serecite, a finer Mica; Titanium Dioxide, which provides a natural SPF 15 protection; and Iron Oxide, which gives our products their beautiful color.
Bella Terra Cosmetics offers classes on their makeup & skincare lines.
How do you choose which colors to create and products to make next?
We listen to our loyal customers and all the retailers that sell our products in the USA and worldwide. When there’s a demand for a new, hot color, we add it to our collection. We currently have 60 shades of mineral eye shimmers, 11 foundations, 5 blushes and 3 bronzers. We also constantly communicate with our customers via Facebook and Twitter and get regular feedback.
In addition, we get a lot of inspiration from the current fashion trends and colors – what’s hot on the runways for next season. We try to keep track of all the new haute couture collections and what the predominant color schemes are.
A look inside the warehouse of Bella Terra Cosmetics.
Bella Terra recently ran a hugely successful deal on a leading Daily Deal site and the volume of orders increased more than 700%. We had to fill insane amounts of orders in a very short period of time and our outdated shipping tactics didn’t help matters. One of our brilliant employees, Leon, insisted, against a lot of resistance, that we move to ShipStation. We did and the change was dramatic. The amount of time spent manually handling the various aspects of the shipping and fulfillment process were reduced to just a few clicks on ShipStation. Label printing, which could sometimes take half a day, now took 20 minutes. We definitely increased productivity, reduced manpower and ultimately improved our bottom line.
What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?
Bulk label creation! You can process 1, 2 or a 1000 labels easily, automatically with just a click of a button!
If you’re looking for new makeup, skincare, or haircare, make sure that you check out Bella Terra Cosmetics today!
Want to be featured in our customer spotlight? Let us know!
Mimoco offers tons of types of themed flash drives, including Elvis (just announced last week!) You can check out their Elvis drives here.
Name:
Jessica Smiley, Community Manager/Social Media
Website:
mimoco.com
Where did you first get the idea to make themed flash drives?
We are all such huge art toy nerds! The collectible, character-based drives were almost an organic progression to functional consumer electronics with personality. Of course, we’ve come a long way from the 128MG drives in series runs of 100 units, to 128GB USB Flash Drives (with USB 3.0 on the way) in opening productions runs of 2,000 pieces.
How do you decide which theme to make next?
Basically, we create collaborations and partnerships with properties and personalities we love, respect and know our loyalists (the ‘mimocult’), like our crew, will totally geek out over. We want to produce product that our loyalists will absolutely need to add to their MIMOBOT collection.
A quick peek into Mimoco’s brightly-colored (of course!) office in Boston!
How has ShipStation helped you with your business?
There are numerous ways that ShipStation has been beneficial to us, but to state it simply, it saves us valuable time. Before ShipStation, we were managing orders from numerous different sources with just as many tools. Now, all of our orders from various online sales channels & marketplaces are in one single, easily accessible piece of software that has been quite a charm to work with. ShipStation provides us a flexible, user-friendly set of tools that scales well across the board that we are happy to have.
What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?
We love that Shipstation is a web-based app with minimal technical setup required. The ability to open up a browser universally to check the status of any one of our hundreds of daily orders is great. We’re also very impressed by the eCommerce integration modules. In addition to that, filtering and tagging, as well as assigning orders, make communication and organization in the shipping department that much easier. These features were immensely helpful during the recent busy holiday season. We’re also big fans of the Google Cloud Print feature. I guess we couldn’t pick just one favorite. Thanks for featuring us and providing an extremely useful tool for our rapidly growing business!
If you’re looking to “Refresh your memory,” check out Mimoco for their themed flash drives. Buy one for you & your friends!
Want to be featured in our customer spotlight? Let us know!
We have amazing customers who sell great products, and we love to spotlight them in our blog. This month’s spotlight is KidsFlyToo.
| Name: Allison Alexander
Website: http://www.kidsflytoo.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/KidsFlyToo |
Allison is the owner of KidsFlyToo, a kids’ travel-themed clothing retailer. She found immediate success with her super cute designs and was soon bogged down in shipping it all out to her customers. Luckily, she found ShipStation and now saves time every day fulfilling her orders through our app. |
Shipstation truly has changed everything about how I do my business. 
Need a cute gift for a child you know this holiday season? KidsFlyToo is the perfect place to find any travel-themed kids’ clothing. Make sure to check them out today!
Want to be featured in our customer spotlight? Let us know!
We have amazing customers who sell great products, and we love to spotlight them in our blog. This month’s spotlight is Ever Blooming Originals.
Colette Rennier, Owner of Ever Blooming Originals
Website: http://www.everbloomingoriginals.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EverBloomingOriginals
Blog: http://everbloomingoriginals.blogspot.com/
How did you decide to start making wreaths and door decorations?
For many years I worked as a Buyer for Williamsburg Catalog, but as a result of a job transfer for my husband we relocated to the Annapolis area about three years ago. At that time I had an interest in opening my own retail store but did not want to be tied down to the constraints of having an actual store front. It was then I decided I would give online retailing a try. After a bit of research I decided I would open an online store and wreaths on Etsy. I opened Ever Blooming Originals in March of 2011.
Collette’s workspace from which she creates those beautiful wreaths!
What’s your favorite type of wreath to make?
My favorite part of having my own online store is coming up with a vision of something I want to make, and then creating it. I enjoy making wreaths that are a bit unexpected, and unusual. By far the most popular item is my famous Bunny Wreath, and now for the winter season I also have a snowman design that my customers are loving!
How has ShipStation helped you with your business?
The best part of having my own business is that I make my own hours. I generally try to operate my business during the day while my youngest is at elementary school. Each work day at 3pm I found myself scrambling to finish up with the making/printing of the labels through PayPal which was so time consuming and frustrating. Thankfully I found ShipStation and it has enabled me to create my labels in a much more efficient manner. I can now print my daily shipping labels in a matter of minutes.
What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?
One of my favorite features about ShipStation is the shipping ‘presets’. This enables me to quickly input the dimensions, and weight for each individual item.
Truly I am so thankful to have found ShipStation. I run the business entirely by myself, and my time is better spent on managing my business rather than the mundane task printing and shipping packages.
The holiday season is officially here! Pick up your wreaths from Ever Blooming Originals today, and then come back for more door decorations for other seasons!
Want to be featured in our customer spotlight? Let us know!
We have amazing customers who sell great products, and we love to spotlight them in our blog. This month’s spotlight is Arda Wigs.
Just one of the many beautiful wigs Arda Wigs offers!
Name: Crystina Williams, Owner
Website: http://arda-wigs.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/
Blog: http://ardawigs.tumblr.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ardawigs
What spurred you to get into the wig business?
We have always been costumers, and we were in the community selling other products when we finally got fed up with the overall lack of quality from other costume wig suppliers. I decided that if other people could do it badly, I certainly could do it well, as I knew what I wanted and I knew what my friends wanted. It’s been quite a learning process, but we’ve always been committed to quality, transparency and treating our customers like friends, because that’s what we wanted in for ourselves.
From your Twitter feed, it looks like you get some wonderful feedback; what’s the most memorable customer story you’ve received?
We actually are far more active on Facebook. That’s where most of our customers come to talk to us and let us know about their projects and purchases, and leave us compliments and feedback. Most recently, a mother who purchases from us very frequently posted a photo of her daughter and all of her daughter’s friends having a slumber party in our wigs. It was really cute, and wonderful to see kids having a great time and getting creative with one another. We love being included in someone’s day like that.
A peek into their warehouse where they design all those gorgeous wigs!
How has ShipStation helped you with your business?
ShipStation has helped greatly; before we moved to Shopify and started using Shipstation, we only had one capability for shipping, and that was Paypal. It was extremely slow and clunky and crashed more often than not, and it caused us to have ridiculously long shipping queues, sometimes over three weeks, depending on our order volume. As our business has been growing continuously over the past two years, it was severely affecting our reputation for timeliness. Since the switch, we’ve been able to cut that time down do 1-2 days, and meet the increasing demand from our growing sales. Everything is faster, our customers are super happy, and it’s alleviated a lot of stress for everyone at the office. I really couldn’t communicate to you the difference the switch has made, but it’s been wonderful. We would never have been able to survive our growth doing it the old way.
What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?
We utilize the ‘On Hold’ status quite a bit, since we often have to place orders aside due to preorders or backorders. That’s been the most helpful to keep us organized, and was a feature we didn’t have before with the old system. It’s really very nice for bookkeeping and organization, and helps with our continued expediency.
Looking for a wig for Halloween or just for fun? Arda Wigs is perfect for your next costume or cosplay with their high-quality wigs. Make sure to check them out today!
Want to be featured in our customer spotlight? Let us know!
Our sporting of the fashionable and handy LOCK LACES™
Name: Louisa Eyler
Title: President
Company: Positive Distribution
Website: http://positivedistribution.com/
Louisa is the distributor for LOCK LACES™, a company that offers bungie cord-style laces for athletes’ running shoes. Her company has been tasked with the marketing, logistics and fulfillment for the brand. Unfortunately, she shortly found herself bogged down in hundreds of orders and hours of processing. Luckily, she found ShipStation, and voila, her day cleared up!
“I can have all of my hundreds of orders done, in less than an hour, and that would not be possible without ShipStation.”
We’re so glad you’re on board, Louisa! Congratulations on your successes and we wish you all the best!
We have amazing customers who sell great products, and we love to spotlight them in our blog. This month’s spotlight is Conscious Box
Name: Jesse Richardson
Title: CCO/CMO
Company: Conscious Box
Web Site: http://consciousbox.com
Facebook: http://facebook.com/consciousbox
Twitter: @ConsciousBox
Where do you sell online?
You can purchase a subscription at ConsciousBox.com.
How did you come up with the idea to start an eco-friendly monthly box service?
Conscious Box is about helping people transition to a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle. With a monthly box, we’re able to introduce subscribers to great products and companies right at their doorstep! In each box, you get the chance to discover new favorites while supporting more conscious consumption. It’s easy, fun, and like having your birthday every month!
What are some of your most memorable products that have been offered in your boxes?
We like to think that every month, all our products are the best. Of course, we’ve picked up a few favorites along the way: Natural Vitality has got the best vitamins and supplements around, Berry Plus sports the most creative packaging we’ve ever seen for laundry soap, and Vega One has introduced us to the most delicious tasting vegan protein blends. That’s not to suggest products like LARABAR, SeedBallz, Kelp Krunch, Wembé, and Planet Inc’s super-powered dishwashing liquid aren’t amazing though. Let’s just say we could go on for days about what memorable products have been featured in Conscious Box :)
How has ShipStation helped your business?
ShipStation has provided us with the shipping solution we’ve been looking for since we started nearly a year ago. Not only do we ship a consistent few thousand boxes each month, but we also deal with dozens of other orders, including press boxes and (of course) the occasional customer service needs. ShipStation brings the demands of each of these tasks together in one place and provides a functionality and layout that makes it all simple. It’s easy to organize our shipments, manual orders are user-proof, and we’ve got a system that we can trust to stay solid.
What is your favorite ShipStation feature?
Since we prefer our whole team to be knowledgeable about shipping, I know we’ve all got our own favorites. Mine, though, has got to be the simplicity behind entering manual orders and keeping track of shipments. It’s easy for me to get list of any new orders we need and remotely print them from my computer, so the labels are ready to go when I am. It’s turned a usually burdensome task into one that is easy for anyone – including the content guy (that’s me).
Looking for an eco-friendly gift box? Visit ConsciousBox.com for a monthly delivery of pure and sustainable products that are handpicked from businesses that care for the planet.
If you would like to be included in our monthly customer spotlight, please contact us and let us know.
We have awesome customers who sell fantastic products, and we love to spotlight them in our blog. This month’s spotlight is Little Baby Bumblebee
Name: Dee Deats
Title: Owner
Company: Little Baby Bumblebee
Web Sites: www.littlebabybumblebee.com and http://www.etsy.com/shop/LittleBabyBumblebee
Facebook: facebook.com/LilBabyBumblebee
Twitter: twitter.com/lilbabybumble
Where do you sell online?
I sell on Etsy and on my own web site (3dCart).
What inspired you to start creating your stickers?
I became inspired to create onesie stickers when I was diagnosed with Thyroid Cancer in July 2010. I was going to school to be a nurse at that time and had clinical training in the Maternity Center. It was so beautiful and awe-inspiring to be involved in the birthing experience of so many families. When I was diagnosed, I had to quit school for treatment and wanted to focus on something other than my cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatments. Since my experience in the Maternity Center was such a wonderful one, I wanted to be involved with families documenting their little ones and hence my inspiration.
What is your most popular sticker design?
My most popular sticker design for girls is my Jade set with bright blues, yellows, and pink that have a adorable scalloped edge design. My most popular sticker design for boys is my Wesley set with blues and green that are shaped like neckties.
How has ShipStation helped your business?
ShipStation has been such a HUGE help and boost for my business. It has streamlined by shipping and invoice process so much that I’m able to spend more time creating new designs and expanding my product line. Shipstation has dramatically reduced my shipping and invoicing process by at least 75% to 80%.
What is your favorite ShipStation feature?
I have two very favorite ShipStation features. The first feature is marking my orders as shipped in each marketplace. The second feature is the automatic notification to my customers with their relevant shipping and tracking information. Both of these are such great timesavers
Visit Little Baby Bumblebee for Monthly Onesie Stickers. They are a unique and perfect way to document your little one throughout their first year of life. These photo props are transparent stickers that are placed on your child’s onesie, tshirt, or bodysuit for picture taking. These are perfect gifts for new moms or moms-to-be.
If you would like to be included in our monthly customer spotlight, please contact us and let us know.
