Educating for success: The “aha” moment that turned it all around 

For Five Senses Education—a leading supplier of educational resources to schools across Australia—peak season hits differently. It’s not just a busy period of the year, it’s fundamental to their entire operations.

“During peak season—which runs from November through to February for us—we process over 60% of our total yearly order volume in just four months. As the business has grown over the years and we’ve added more schools to our register, we’ve had to fundamentally shift the way we operate to keep up with demand,” Jane Furniss, Director of Five Senses Education, explained. 

It’s a scenario all too familiar for many growing ecommerce businesses. It’s that moment when order volume triples overnight and the manual processes start to buckle. You know something needs to change. For Furniss, that ”aha” moment came five years ago during COVID, when she received a phone call from an upset rural customer whose order had been sent to a post office an hour away because of a human error on a shipping label. 

“At that time we had four people whose sole job was to create post labels. They could not keep up with the number of orders that were flooding in, and we were letting customers down.  Our staffing costs were through the roof and for a few weeks we couldn’t deliver on time. It just wasn’t sustainable, and we knew we needed a better system in place,” Furniss explained. “That’s when we turned to ShipStation.”  

A family business from humble beginnings

Five Senses Education has come a long way since its humble beginnings over 50 years ago. While working as a primary school teacher at the time, Joy—Furniss’ mother—saw firsthand the struggles students were having with their reading, and was determined to help. She started her first tutoring service in northwest Sydney, sourcing educational materials from local suppliers to assist the kids with their learning. From there, an idea took shape to help even more students on a greater scale. Together with Furniss, she decided to expand, and what started as a local tutoring service has since grown into a nationwide distribution business.

“For 25 years, my mum and I ran and operated a small chain of educational bookshops with tutoring services in northwest Sydney. In the beginning, our customers were students and parents. From there we started to supply educational resources to schools and even began publishing our own books,” Furniss explained.  

The real seismic shift in the business happened during COVID. At the helm, Furniss oversaw a massive operational pivot, moving the business from traditional retail roots into a high-tech, high-velocity distribution model that serves thousands of institutions across Australia.

“We have slowly and organically grown from being a local community-based business into a larger nationwide business with a big online presence, in addition to our brick-and-mortar stores,” she explained. “We now supply to around 4,300 educational institutions and 100,000 individual families.” 

five senses education finds automated order fulfillment with shipstation

Turning an operational challenge into a growth lever 

As the business expanded, Furniss soon discovered that their manual fulfillment processes could no longer support the order volume coming in, particularly around peak season.

“We knew we were going to have to do things differently if we wanted to grow.”

Jane Furniss, Director, Five Senses Education

Before ShipStation, Furniss and her team were struggling to keep up with the demand. Orders were delayed as the team couldn’t get labels printed and packages out the door quickly enough. Spreadsheets were no longer enough to manage the huge influx of orders. The heavy reliance on manual processes resulted in unnecessary shipping errors, costing the business time and money. 

In 2022, Furniss turned to ShipStation to help streamline their fulfillment and hasn’t looked back. ShipStation seamlessly integrates with Five Senses’ selling channels, pulling orders in automatically. With a few clicks, the team can print labels up to 20x faster, save hundreds of dollars per day by sourcing the best carrier rates. Automation rules ensure seamless delivery every time, ensuring they get their book packs out the door and in customers’ hands faster. 

Since implementing ShipStation, Five Senses Education has doubled their order volume, without increasing headcount. In their busiest month, they shipped a staggering 11,394 book packs with 99% order accuracy. 

ShipStation’s split shipping functionality, in particular, has been a massive game-changer for Five Senses. Every year, the business sets up custom back-to-school book and stationery packs in their system in preparation for peak season. Parents are given the link to purchase the packs before the school year starts. The products are sourced in advance from suppliers around the world. 

When they discovered late last year that a math textbook in the packs wasn’t going to arrive in time from the publisher—with 3,000 orders waiting to be shipped out—they used ShipStation’s Split Ship feature to get book packs out the door immediately, then sent automated tracking updates to affected customers about the delayed item. When the math textbooks finally arrived, they were able to batch print 3,000 labels and get the products out within a day. 

“Years ago, this would have created a major challenge for us, and it would have taken us several days to get all of these orders out. With ShipStation, it was so easy and quick to split the shipments. I don’t know how we operated in the past without it!”

Jane Furniss, Director, Five Senses Education

Automating for the future and delivering memorable customer experiences 

In addition to solving the operational challenge of scaling without increasing headcount, the business has also undergone a complete website overhaul, enlisting the services of ecommerce agency webqem, to help them improve the front-end experience for their customers, making it easier for customers to browse their extensive catalog of over 40,000 products. 

Today, Five Senses continues to go from strength to strength, and they have just been awarded as a preferred provider for a NSW Department of Education tender, which would see their business added as the book supplier for an additional 2,200 schools.

With a strict 24-hour delivery KPI to meet as part of this tender and zero room for error, Furniss will be looking to further optimize their current shipping strategy, expanding on ShipStation’s core features, including: 

  • Optimizing warehouse efficiencies by utilising features such as smarter batching and scan-to-verify to eliminate manual errors that eat up time. 
  • Initiating self-service returns to enhance the customer experience while keeping the back-end operations lean. 
  • Utilizing AI intelligence and automation to make shipping smarter, including carrier selection and routing logic to provide a more seamless delivery experience.  

“Our journey with Shipstation started with our online orders. Now, we are moving our bulk school sales and wholesale divisions to ShipStation, as well. We don’t need more tech; we need to use the intelligence within the tech we already have, and with this information at our fingertips, we will be able to make better, smarter decisions for our bottom line.”

Jane Furniss, Director, Five Senses Education

Ready to scale your peak season without scaling your headcount?

Five Senses Education’s story is a familiar one for growing businesses—manual processes that worked at one volume start to break at the next. ShipStation’s automated order fulfillment helps you meet demand without compromising speed, accuracy, or customer experience.

Start shipping with ShipStation today, and see what intelligent delivery can do for your business.