A little over a year ago I wrote a post entitled New Warehouse Layout, Inventory Zones, & Efficiency where I explained our new “inventory zone” system. Prior to implementing that system, packing slips would just print out items in alphabetical order, potentially sending one of us all over the warehouse to pull the products for [...]
Archive for the ‘Warehouse’ Category
Our Warehouse – Updated Pics, Order Packing, and the Future
Our growth feels so slow and steady sometimes that I forget that we’ve actually grown a ton in a short amount of time. The visual representation of this is our warehouse. Updated Pics This is what our product selection looked like just after we moved in on 2/25/2008: Pretty bare. Like an empty cave. Compare [...]
You Don’t See This…Ever
Our neighbors in our industrial park are Ruan Transportation, a large trucking company. We share part of a really big building. As we pulled into the parking lot on Monday morning, we saw this: That’s insane. I’ve never seen anything like it. Normally they just have a handful of relatively new, clean trucks sitting outside. [...]
Thank You DI Customers!
It’s 4:13 PM on Tuesday and I think this is the first second that I’ve had to relax since last Wednesday. The past five days have been out of control busy. When posted on Thursday I was excited to find out what was to come of our Thanksgiving-Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday sale, but I wasn’t quite sure what [...]
Warehouse Hockey & Company Culture
Last year I wrote about how we use our shipping dock as a hockey goal. For a while it was fun to just blast shots at the goal. Then it was fun to try to score a goal from real far away. Then it was fun to put up targets with pictures of our least [...]
The Bootstrapped Office
My favorite Lifehacker posts are their “featured workspaces.” If you haven’t seen it, people submit their unique work areas and they pick the best of the best to display on the blog. The ones they pick are usually some combination of simplicity, elegance, creativity, and affordability. If you have a few minutes, take a look [...]
New Warehouse Layout, Inventory Zones, & Efficiency
A few weekends back we re-organized the product layout in the warehouse. When we first moved in we only had one row of products. Since then we’ve just been adding shelving units as we go, with no real organization other than trying to keep items of a specific brand together. It grew to the point [...]
Did I Mention How Much I Love Winter?
Wtf is going on this winter? My plans totally keep getting messed up. Today I have a cold/flu, and this is what it currently looks like outside of the warehouse (all of that is from the last 2-3 hours): New Years Eve plans officially canceled. Who knows when FedEx will make it out to us [...]
So, That Went Pretty Well
Apparently our specials worked pretty well. We pretty much crushed our expectations for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Take a look at our shipping area on Monday with all of the orders from over the weekend: That prior record of 73 items shipped out in a day is now somewhere around 130. Then we followed that [...]
Anatomy of an Efficient Process – How We Pack Orders
I mentioned in my last post that I was going to come back and delve a little deeper into our new packing area. The process outlined below is a combination of George’s prior e-commerce experience, my industrial engineering experience, Greg’s overall business experience, and the work that Mike has done in studying how our competition [...]
