Project overview
In 2020 Zen Naturals launched their first product and chose Amazon as the distribution channel. They made this decision for several reasons: fulfillment is a much simpler solution than packing and shipping parcels in-house, allowing for end-to-end last-mile service, so companies don't have to get involved in warehousing and logistics operations at all, which is undoubtedly very convenient. A manufacturer of eco dietary supplements first entered the British market, then the German market - and all worked well until Brexit.
Since then, sending goods between the EU and the UK started to cause problems. Transfers have become much less predictable in terms of transit time and particularly duty clearance while becoming much more expensive. Of course, this affects different industries to varying degrees: there are products that easily pass customs inspections and those that prove problematic, such as dietary supplements. It turned out that not all courier companies are willing to undertake the delivery of dietary supplements to the UK.
Brexit effectively came into effect on January 1, 2021. Zen Naturals shipped 2-3 shipments classically as before, it took on average 3 months longer than before, and with huge challenges and overall chaos and was a lot more expensive – so the owners decided that it didn't make sense to continue managing logistics this way. They wanted to find a partner who would send pallet shipments to the UK with much greater accuracy and established cooperation with one of the large courier companies in Europe (top 10 suppliers).
Unfortunately, as Zen Naturals reported, these pallets did not arrive for more than 2 months - and no one was able to give a competent answer as to why this was happening. Only after that time, it transpired those branches of the same company in different countries had inconsistent information, which misled the customer and caused a significant loss - in terms of time, money, and customer satisfaction (stockouts on a key product), resulting in a particularly unpleasant experience.
Zen Naturals’ management realized that they wouldn't work with that company and started looking for a new business partner who would be able to serve them effectively - and that's how the Linker Cloud was approached.
