The sweeter that business gets at Shari's Berries International Inc.’s Berries.com, the tougher it gets, because every product is prepared by hand the same day it’s ordered. "Everything is just-in-time inventory," says Dann Trujillo, marketing manager. "Every order out today is freshly dipped today."
With a highly perishable product, Berries.com was searching for ways to regulate order flow. Its solution: e-mail messages to customers well in advance of peak periods. "We want to be able to manage the people and logistics of shipping our products, so I shoot out e-mail messages to our customers several weeks before Christmas, encouraging them to order early,” Trujillo says. “That way we also know how many berries to order."
Berries.com sells unusually large California strawberries dipped in chocolate and sold in several varieties of gift packages, including a bouquet of "roses" that are actually the delectable berries in disguise. Because they’ve become so popular as special gifts at particular times of the year, such as Christmas and Valentine’s Day, orders come in spikes that can be difficult to control. The company must quickly expand its operating space and hire hundreds of temps to handle its peak periods.
In one pre-Christmas e-mail message, for example, Berries.com urged customers to order by midnight, Dec. 12, to receive a $5 discount off orders of $40 or more. A box of a dozen strawberries retails for $45.95.
Once on the site, Berries.com shoppers are encouraged to enter their e-mail addresses by signing up for a self-service shipment tracking system. That not only builds Berries.com’s e-mail list, Trujillo notes, but it keeps its busy staff dipping and shipping strawberries instead of taking customer service calls.
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