Los Angeles-based record purveyors Vinyl Moon are taking a well-loved musical medium to new heights. Through their subscription-based, mixtape club-style record delivery service, the company, which is partnered with the famous Amoeba Records, is breathing life back into the vinyl record industry amid an increasingly digital landscape. Users of ShipStation for over six years, Vinyl Moon knows that when something works, it works.

Finding a better way

“For the first few months of business, I was importing spreadsheets into another program and getting labels that way, which was arduous and complex. I kept thinking, ‘there’s got to be a better way.’ That’s kind of my mantra with all things business-related: there’s got to be a better way.”

For Brandon, that “better way” turned out to be through ShipStation.

“I remember first getting into ShipStation and feeling like it was overkill, coming from the sort of limited functionality of my old program. It was overwhelming,” says Brandon. “Fast forward a couple of years, though, and now, I’m ready for even more functionality.” 

As a subscription service, Vinyl Moon’s shipping process isn’t always simple. Subscriptions represent about 90% of all their orders, with the other 10% being add-ons, which are extra records added on to the monthly subscription vinyl. The company sends out between 3,500-4,000 orders a month, and each order has the potential to become complicated.

“As a club that also offers side purchases, we have a complex shipping flow where we’re getting new orders that we want to ship immediately and getting some orders that we need to put on hold until we get that club content in. Having a system that can help navigate those complex shipping quotes has been huge,” says Brandon. “Being able to tag orders or organize things and add automation rules has been huge. We’re also able to use logic trees and ‘if this then that’ functionality to organize our shipment flow,” he says.

Achieving mission-aligned goals

While Vinyl Moon considers itself to be a small business, they saw huge spikes in revenue over the Covid lockdowns that put them well into medium-sized territory. 

“I think a lot of the landscape, especially with digital marketing changed in that time,” Brandon says. “A lot of people were staying home and appreciating their turntables and at-home experiences, which is kind of what we specialize in. We were sort of the original cheerleaders of the at-home experience before they were cool.”  

As the brand positions itself for growth, it only makes sense that their shipping software grows with them. And, while Vinyl Moon’s goals may include dollars and trending graphs, at the core of their business is a simple, wholesome philosophy:

“We believe in the joy of getting something in the mail that has an element of surprise every month.” 

Facilitating joy is what ShipStation aims to do with every label printed and package sent. We loved Vinyl Moon’s mission so much that we decided to check it out for ourselves! Or, at least, we tried:

If you’ve got a needle in your record player and a love of music in your heart, be sure to keep up with Vinyl Moon as they continue spreading the love through music every month!