The Whiskey Ball

I’ll admit, I’m not a whiskey drinker, so what’s the difference between the Whiskey Ball, whiskey stones, and the other methods of cooling down your drink?

The Whiskey Ball is an ice ball mold that makes jumbo, slow melting ice spheres to cool your drink without watering it down. It produces an ice ball that has more volume and less surface area than a traditional ice cube- so they melt slower. The ice ball is 2.5″ in diameter and round so that very little surface area has contact with the liquid.

Some of those other methods are great alternatives and many of our customers actually have them in their household as well. The feedback that we have received from customers is that The Whiskey Ball cools more effectively and more akin to what they are used to putting in their whiskey- ice cubes. A jumbo ice cube in any served drink is also a guaranteed conversation piece.

Have there been any particular struggles in building your business to where it is today? Likewise, do you have any advice for other startups?

The biggest challenge we have had in building our business was knowing how much product to order. Our business is heavily dependent on carrying inventory which means your cash is sitting in your warehouse. With that comes risk and reduction in cash flow that could be used for sales, marketing, expansion, etc. Buy too little and your per unit cost go up and run the risk of not being able to fulfill your orders. Order too much and your inventory sits there incurring risk and not growing your business in any way.

In order to know how much to order, you need to determine how many you are selling per day and have some forecast or guesstimate of customer growth. Figure out number of units sold per month and then break it down by units sold per day. ShipStation has some great reports that help you get that total units sold during a certain time frame. If your business is seasonal you may want to get metrics on the same period last year. We like to order every 3 months so if we sold say 100 units per day, we would place an order 9000-10,000 units (100 units x 30.4 average days per month x 3 months). Depending on your available monetary resources, you may want to order more frequently.

How has ShipStation helped you with your business?

Because ShipStation is in the cloud, I not only can prepare my orders from anywhere, my team and I can service customer inquires and orders from anywhere. I also love ShipStation’s reporting capabilities that converge sales across all of my channels from a single place. It has given me insight into my sales that I never had.

What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?

I love product defaults because it saves me from applying shipping presets to orders that comes in. One of the reasons why I switched over from from previous solution provider was because ShipStation enables me to prepare my daily orders more accurately and 10x faster.