Duronic: How a UK Brand Put Its EU Warehouse in Charge

Every morning at Duronic’s warehouse in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, the day starts the same way: one person at a screen, printing labels. During peak season—Christmas, summer, the big pushes—it’s still just one person. That wasn’t always the case.

Duronic has been selling consumer electronics, kitchen appliances, and ergonomic office gear since 2005. The company started in the United Kingdom. When Brexit brought customs changes and delays to European Union shipments from the UK, Duronic set up its own German base. 

Today, Duronic’s UK and German warehouses each ship more than 100,000 orders a year, from single parcels to full pallets, across the UK and over a dozen European countries. In Europe, Amazon is just the start. Every country brings its own marketplace landscape. France alone has more than a dozen.

Nicolas Jumeau, Duronic’s Operations Director, has been with the company since 2014, when it began selling beyond the UK. He’s tested a lot of multi-channel shipping software over the years. He knows what to look for, and he knows exactly where each platform falls short.

The problem with ShippyPro

When Duronic’s German operation launched, Nicolas needed a platform that could connect to European couriers, including small, local ones that most international software ignores. ShippyPro fit that brief. But it came at a cost.

ShippyPro had no warehouse management system and no real integration with inventory tools. Nicolas ran shipping and stock control from two platforms that couldn’t properly sync. If orders flew through faster than the inventory system could detect them, the counts fell out of step. To compensate, Duronic held safety stock buffers of 100 to 200 units per SKU. Not to meet real demand, but to protect against phantom shortfalls.

A packing list problem made daily warehouse life harder still. ShippyPro printed whatever product title came in from the originating marketplace—language included. Packing lists in the wrong language and tiny text meant the warehouse team spent extra time double-checking orders, and mistakes still slipped through.

“You can’t say black in every country—noir, nero, schwarz. Whatever language we put on one platform, that’s what shows up on the packing list. The packing list was not great for us. The warehouse had to verify a lot of labels,” Nicolas said.

Then there was batch processing. ShippyPro sorted orders first come, first served, with no way to group or prioritize without manually searching, selecting, and sorting. Every morning.

“If you were to just select all and print, the products would not come in alphabetical order. There was no way to group things together unless you made a search and selected them all manually,” Nicolas explained.

Why Duronic went looking for new shipping software

Duronic streamlined its courier relationships down to UPS®. With shipping simplified, Nicolas could choose software for what mattered most day to day: usability, automation, and control. ShipStation had been on his radar. He made the switch about a year ago.

3 ShipStation features that matter

Ask Nicolas what ShipStation gets right, and three features come up every time.

The first is packing slip customization. Duronic now controls exactly what appears on every packing slip, in whatever language and format the warehouse needs. This matters more than ever: a recent partnership with a major retailer requires fully blank-label packing slips with no Duronic branding. 

“Some platforms are built on a dropship model where they don’t even want us to mention our name on the packing slip. This is doable with ShipStation,” Nicolas said.

The second is tags. ShipStation’s tag-based automation sorts and batches orders before anyone touches them. Preorders get flagged separately. Refurbished items route to the team that handles them. Priority orders queue first. 

“First thing in the morning, we try to get the big items out first because that’s the bulk of the pallets,” he explained. “ShipStation’s automation allows us to do it very quickly and easily.” 

What used to require manual sorting every morning now happens automatically.

The third is alternate SKU mapping. For some of Duronic’s stores, the same product carries different SKU codes across channels. ShipStation maps those variations together, keeping orders clean without manual reconciliation.

The result: One person, peak season

The clearest measure of what’s changed is headcount at the print station. Before ShipStation, peak season at the German warehouse needed two or three people just to keep up with the morning’s labels. Last Christmas—Duronic’s first full peak season on the new software—one person handled it.

The stock discrepancy problem is essentially gone. Without the sync gap between two mismatched platforms, safety stock buffers that once sat at 100 to 200 units per SKU came down to roughly 10. That freed up warehouse space and made available inventory counts reliable enough to actually trust.

Today, three warehouse staff at the German site handle their own daily shipping, regardless of age or technical background. Office staff used to do it, until the warehouse team asked to take over. Now, the office no longer has to cover for the floor. The warehouse can see when it’s nearly done with a batch and bring in the next one on its own. No waiting on labels. No gaps. When the warehouse runs its own show, the whole flow moves faster.

Ready to simplify fulfillment across Europe? Start shipping with ShipStation today.