I’m very excited to share today that, due to the success of our initial collaboration, we are expanding our partnership with Super-Pharm and will be more than tripling the amount of orders we fulfill for them. In order to continue serving Super-Pharm’s customers with exceptional eCommerce experiences, and in order to meet this increased volume, we will be building a new micro-fulfillment center, double the size of our first MFC, that will launch later this year.
When we launched operations serving Super-Pharm in our first micro-fulfillment center in Tel Aviv two years ago, our whole team was buzzing with enthusiasm, and we were excited about the opportunity to create great value for this iconic brand. But we couldn’t possibly have anticipated how the following years would unfold.
More than a year into this we now all know the story: the pandemic hit, and e-commerce exploded. Super-Pharm is Israel’s largest health and beauty retailer, and their online sales went from great to overwhelming during the height of that first wave of national lockdowns. When we started Fabric, we never thought on-demand e-commerce fulfillment would become an essential service, but COVID showed otherwise and I couldn’t be more proud of our team for doing their part in helping Super-Pharm’s customers in these difficult times.
The sudden and major uptick in demand was a big challenge, as we wanted to ensure Super-Pharm would be able to serve all of their customers in their community’s greatest time of need, and I was truly humbled to see how both the Super-Pharm team and the Fabric team rose to the occasion.
When the pandemic hit without warning, we were able to almost double the number of orders being fulfilled in March when compared to February, from the same micro-fulfillment center. Throughout the rest of the COVID period in 2020, we maintained a new normal of that increased order volume, and saw an increase of up to a mind-bending 3.5x from where we started that year.
We’ve come a long way since we launched operations in MFC ONE in 2018, the first year of which was all about learning. As the first live robotics micro-fulfillment center in the world, there were a lot of kinks to work out, and we worked shoulder to shoulder with our partners at Super-Pharm to improve our product, ramp up capacity, to drive efficiencies and to serve Super-Pharm’s customers with the highest level of service that they deserve. At the end of 2019, we were already hitting the targets we set out to achieve – none of us had anticipated the test that our technology and operations would be put to with the onset of the pandemic, or the critical role they would play in supporting Super-Pharm’s e-commerce growth.
Super-Pharm now fulfils more e-commerce orders than any other Israeli company, and the fact that they’re putting their trust in Fabric to support them scaling their ecommerce business and serve their customers is the best testament for the value Fabric brings.
Seeing the way our fulfillment solution was able to be leveraged during those strange and challenging months has been super exciting – and we’re hoping to bring that enthusiasm with us into this new chapter of our partnership’s story.
I’m confident our partnership with Super-Pharm can provide a blueprint for other forward-thinking retailers and brands who want to build a scalable, flexible fulfillment infrastructure – demonstrating that the micro-fulfillment model not only works, but can be used to scale e-commerce businesses faster and more efficiently, while elevating the experience to the end customer.