Just Poppin

How did you decide to start selling gourmet popcorn & popcorn kernels?

It’s the old story of building a business out of something you love.

We’re crazy about popcorn – really, really, great popcorn. One day in 2007, while on a mission to make amazing homemade caramel corn, we came across a comment on an online recipe post about how if you want to make “real” caramel corn, you’d use Mushroom Popcorn kernels (they pop into cool looking round ball shapes that are sturdy enough to stand up to the caramelizing process). Well, Buck (half of the founding duo of Buck & Jennie) is a research fanatic and jumped into it headfirst. From there came relationships with growers and a lot more research to identify the perfect Mushroom Popcorn kernel. Once we had more stock than we needed (realize this was all about just making some caramel corn at home!), we decided to sell the excess on eBay. That was the start of it all. From there we expanded into our own online store, additional varieties of popcorn kernels, flavorings, popping equipment, and we’re about to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of moving into our new warehouse and office space.

Have you ever had any crazy flavors or flavorings for sale (even crazier than the jalapeño)?

We just released 3 new shake-on popcorn seasonings that we think folks are really going to love: Wild Buffalo Wing, Ketchup, and Salt & Vinegar. Around the holidays we also offer a special flavor in our popped and flavored popcorn line – Cinnamon Blast which tastes a lot like the little red cinnamon candies most people are familiar with.

How has ShipStation helped you with your business?

Let’s start by saying that in the past week, Shipstation has allowed us to actually lower the shipping rates we charge on nearly a third of our orders!

When you run a small business, there’s a constant tug-of-war between doing things to grow your business, and doing the day-to-day tasks necessary to fulfill the business you currently have. A big part of the day-to-day for a company that ships its own products is organizing orders from various marketplaces, deciding how to pack them, selecting and printing the proper postage, handling customer service requests specifically related to shipments, etc. It’s so much work in fact that sometimes you can find yourself buried in it to the detriment of growing the business itself. That’s the position we were often finding ourselves in during the last couple of years as our business has grown.

Shipstation has allowed us to make some dramatic changes to the way we ship by aggregating orders and simplifying nearly every step of order processing and shipping including giving us detailed insight into our shipping costs, and giving us access to the USPS cubic shipping program. The biggest effect of this has been reducing our cost to ship a large portion of our packages and being able to pass those savings directly to our customers. We just added a new shipping range to our shopping cart that will reduce shipping charges by more than 20% for nearly a third of all orders. This in a year that shipping companies like USPS, FedEx, and UPS had record price increases. We couldn’t be happier!

What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?

Jen: The “at a glance” Sales Overview page that greets me when I log in. I love how it shows me in easy graphs, pie charts, and basic figures how we’re doing across ALL of our online marketplaces. Now we have a much better idea of how certain products are doing across the board. To get this kind of reporting before ShipStation would have involved Excel gymnastics!

Buck: Um… besides all the money we’re saving on postage? Seriously though, it has to be data availability. The postage savings don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re a result of being able to make better informed choices about how best to pack and ship our orders. We’re able to make those choices now more than ever before thanks to having access to more easily accessible and detailed data about our orders and shipping. I try not to dwell too much on the amount time we’ve wasted over the past few years trying to do this very same thing with the tools (and I use the term loosely) we were using before Shipstation.