Why Cheeky Panda Made Delivery Choice the Center of Its Customer Experience

The sustainable tissue brand using multi-carrier shipping as a retention strategy

Every roll of Cheeky Panda tissue starts with a simple question: why are we still cutting down trees for something we throw away?

Co-founder Chris Forbes asked that question after learning how many trees are felled every day to produce toilet paper and tissues. The answer was bamboo—a plant that grows up to 30 times faster than trees and can serve as a far more sustainable alternative for everyday paper products. That insight became The Cheeky Panda—a B Corp-certified brand on a mission to protect forests without asking customers to compromise.

Today, Cheeky Panda sells five million units a year. It’s one of the fastest-growing consumer goods companies in the UK. Its direct-to-consumer operation alone ships around 500,000 parcels annually—and every one of those shipments extends the brand promise. Getting that right matters.

“You don’t have a business if this delivery part of it isn’t right,” Forbes said at The Delivery Conference. “Otherwise, you’ll always just be chasing your tail.”

Bringing fulfillment in-house—without losing control

For most of its life, Cheeky Panda’s fulfillment ran through a third-party warehouse with its own software. It was a workable solution for a younger business. But as the brand scaled and decided to move fulfillment into its own central warehouse, the limitations became clear. Managing multiple delivery vendors across a patchwork of UK postcodes was complex, manual, and hard to scale. The business needed a multi-carrier shipping solution. That solution needed to sit cleanly inside its existing technology stack and handle complexity without requiring a purpose-built engineering effort.

“The challenge is bringing in an extra delivery vendor,” Forbes said. “You’ve got lots of different postcodes, and it’s about creating that automation. And that’s where ShipStation really came in.”

The brief was clear: a solution that plugs in, plays nicely with existing systems, and scales with a brand that isn’t slowing down.

One platform, two carriers, zero custom builds

ShipStation integrated directly with Cheeky Panda’s Shopify storefront and NetSuite ERP, anchoring a fulfillment stack the company now fully controls. From the moment a customer reaches the basket, ShipStation is at work—surfacing carrier options via Evri and DPD, routing orders intelligently, and carrying the process through to delivery and fulfillment.

What previously required significant technical resources to build and maintain—routing half a million parcels a year across multiple carriers and postcodes—now runs through a single, integrated multi-carrier shipping platform. No custom builds. No data scientists splitting out postcode logic manually.

“We do millions of packages a year,” Forbes said. “You wouldn’t want to do that manually. You need something that can plug and play quite easily, and we found that ShipStation was a very good solution—just plug and play without us having to do too much of the legwork.”

The real return: Giving customers the journey they want

Cost savings weren’t the primary goal. For Cheeky Panda, the deeper value of multi-carrier shipping is what it means for the customer on the other end of the transaction.

Forbes is direct about the business logic: with customer acquisition costs on platforms like Meta and Google continuing to rise, retention isn’t optional—it’s the whole game. And retention, for a brand whose customers need to reorder regularly, lives or dies on the delivery experience.

“When you start to look at the amount of money you can spend on Meta and Google these days and the cost of acquisition, you’ve really got to focus on not having a leaky bucket,” Forbes said at The Delivery Conference. “It’s about retention, and retention is about delivery and customer experience.”

Delivery performance isn’t uniform. A carrier that excels in one region may underperform in another. A customer who has had a frustrating experience—and has no alternative to choose from—is less likely to reorder. Giving customers the ability to select their own delivery experience removes that friction entirely.

“Deliveries in different areas vary by courier,” Forbes said, “so giving the customer the option helps with repeat subscriptions. Anything we can do to reduce friction is a good thing.”

For a subscription-friendly product like tissue—bought regularly and often on auto-renewal—that friction has a direct impact on whether customers come back. ShipStation’s multi-carrier capability feeds directly into Cheeky Panda’s retention model.

What changed

Since integrating ShipStation across its Shopify and NetSuite infrastructure, Cheeky Panda has built a fulfillment operation that reflects the quality and values of the brand behind it:

• ~500,000 direct-to-consumer parcels shipped annually through ShipStation
• 98%+ delivery fulfillment rate, up from around 90% in earlier years
• Multi-carrier shipping via Evri and DPD, routed through a single integrated platform
• Basket-level carrier selection, giving customers control over their own delivery experience
• Full integration across Shopify and NetSuite—no custom engineering required

Don’t reinvent the wheel

For any ecommerce brand facing the same multi-carrier shipping challenge, Forbes’s advice is simple.

Building a brand around sustainability means caring about every part of the customer journey—including the last mile. With ShipStation handling the complexity, Cheeky Panda keeps its focus where it belongs: making products that are better for the planet, and making it easy for customers to choose them again and again.

Want to give your customers the delivery experience they deserve? Start a free ShipStation trial today.