If you've been in an independent coffee shop—or a Crate and Barrel—in the last three years, you've probably seen Fellow products already. From kettles to mugs and even grinders, the company crafts beautiful, thoughtfully-designed brewing tools that do more than just look good.
"Our goal is to help you make ridiculously good coffee," says Key Account Sales Manager Alicia Roberts.
When Alicia joined Fellow in 2019, the team was fewer than 20 people. Since then, it's expanded to 80, with plans to grow by another 50% this year alone. And behind Fellow's rapid growth is a comprehensive business strategy powered by automation.
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Serving businesses large and small
Today, the company sells its products to a wide range of retailers across 50 countries. But as Fellow grew, it became tougher to balance selling to large retail accounts like Nordstrom while still supporting mom-and-pop shops that are the backbone of Fellow's business model.
"Our goal is to always focus on the specialty coffee community," Alicia says. "There are so many cool coffee shops out there. We absolutely want them to have our product, and we absolutely want Fellow to be sold in their shops."
"But there was this pivotal moment where we were like, 'Well, we want to work with these small mom-and-pop retailers, but we just don't have the bandwidth as account managers to manually set up hundreds of new wholesale accounts and manage our national retail accounts,'" she recalls.
At the time, the Fellow team already used Zapier to send leads from a web form into their CRM. But Alicia, along with an intern, knew that the automation platform could also help them better serve small business customers—so they decided to overhaul Fellow's entire wholesale customer onboarding process with Zapier.
Now, when a new wholesale lead fills out a form powered by Jotform, Zapier automatically records it in Copper (the team's CRM) and assigns it to the right person for approval. Once approved, Zapier automatically sends out personalized onboarding materials to the new customer—including the right tax forms based on where the customer is located.
After the customer fills out the forms, another set of Zaps uploads the documents to our Google Drive and sets up the customer in Shopify with the correct tax settings and wholesale discount. This has drastically decreased manual touchpoints and tedious tasks.
"Without Zapier, we wouldn’t have been able to support the thousands of smaller wholesale accounts who buy direct from us. Zapier has allowed us to maintain those important relationships without increasing order minimums or annual spend," Alicia explains.
With automation, supporting these wholesale customers takes the Fellow team 8-10 hours per week, about 4X faster than if they had to manage the process manually. And Fellow can continue serving its core demographic while still growing.
Managing business-critical work with Zapier
At Fellow, Zapier does more than create a smooth experience for customers of all sizes. It also helps the Fellow team manage critical internal processes like order modification, inventory management, and feature development.
For example, Zapier allows Fellow to easily modify eCommerce orders when a customer needs to make a change, which provides a better customer experience and helps the support team do more, faster.
"With webhooks, Zapier lets us put an order on hold, flag an order, or update an order's status on the fly," says Fellow's eCommerce Product Manager, Stephen Davis Hernandez. "Since we offer personalization for some items—customers can add custom engraving to a mug, for example—it's crucial that we can approve or reject those kinds of changes to an order, without needing a custom-coded workflow or app."
Automation also empowered Stephen to create an easier way to stay on top of Fellow's inventory.
"It's called Fetch, and it's a Zap that posts a message to Slack if a product's inventory falls below a certain level," he explains. "Folks can also type in a Slack command, and the Zap will respond with a message telling them what that product's inventory levels are at that moment. Now that I think about it, this is how my boss stays on top of inventory!"
But the biggest impact of automation for Stephen has been how it's unlocked customer data across the company.
"Working with design and brand, marketing, coffee, customer support, personalization, wholesale—it's exceptionally cross-functional. Access to data is super important," he notes.
"With Zapier, I can use webhooks to make sure order fulfillment data is up-to-date across our apps, so it tells an accurate story. I've even created a Zap that pulls support tickets into an app called Airfocus, which lets us prioritize feature requests by seeing how many customers are asking for a certain product or feature."
A new way of working
All in all, Stephen says, Fellow's eCommerce operations couldn't function without Zapier—and neither could he.
"I've been at Fellow for six months, but I've been using Zapier for six years. It's been so cool to bring automation into this role where it has a much bigger impact than just, say, sending myself a reminder before a meeting," he says.
"Those reminders are still really helpful for me, but we're basically building the backbone of our entire customer experience with Zapier, and it's exciting to see how well it's scaled."
And though she's on a different team, Alicia sees automation in the same way.
"Because of Zapier, all of the account managers are able to focus their time on key accounts and the channel strategy that drives revenue growth," she says.
"It was a refreshing change in our day-to-day routine. And then we just started thinking: 'Oh, if we can do this with Zapier, what else can we do?'"
