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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Warehouse
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 where pulling and packing a large order took forever. You’d be running around like a chicken with your head cut off, going up and down rows on one side of the warehouse to get a few products, then back to the other side for a … Continue reading
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 to pick up orders. At this point I’m just hoping to get home at a decent hour and get some sleep. Damn.
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 up by absolutely killing Cyber Monday and doing single-day records in terms of number of sales and revenue. If you take out a fluky $6k order we had once through Tastefully Driven, Monday probably doubled any other single-day revenue. Pretty, pretty good. I couldn’t help … Continue reading
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 and other e-commerce sites ship orders (specifically this great newegg video), along with a whole lot of trial and error. It allows us to process orders faster, with less mistakes, and with less variation. As any process should be, it’s been designed explicitly with … Continue reading
Where I Work – Updated Warehouse Pics
A whole lot has changed since that frigid Monday in February when we worked our first day from our warehouse. We survived not paying ourselves, we’ve grown our sites by leaps and bounds, we’ve made significant improvements to all of our business processes from accounting to shipping, and we’ve seen revenue grow to more than double what it was in 2007. But one of the best ways to see progress is to walk through our warehouse. Everyday I walk out on the floor I’m amazed at how much we have progressed in just nine short months. Take a glance at … Continue reading
Getting Creative for Winter
Back in March I wrote about how I was changing my schedule to accommodate our early morning deliveries to our warehouse. Six months later, we’ve all pretty much acclimated to working from 7:30 AM to around 3:30 PM on our warehouse days. Even though we’ve more than doubled our inventory since March, we’re able to receive 99% of our deliveries in that block of time. UPS comes every day around 11 AM. FedEx delivers at 7:30 AM and picks up around 3 PM. Freight companies generally come in the early afternoon. On the rare occasion that a freight company is … Continue reading
Linksys WRT54G3G / Sprint Mobile Broadband Review (Hint: Well Worth Every Penny)
Back when we moved into our warehouse we were shocked to find out that there was no high speed internet available in our building. When we contacted local high speed providers, we quickly realized that adding a line to the building would cost a ton (like either $4,000 down plus $140/mo, or $300/mo with a 5 year commitment). So our somewhat risky solution was to get a Sprint Mobile Broadband card and use it in conjunction with the Linksys WRT54G3G router below. We didn’t know how good of cell phone reception we’d get. We didn’t know if the router would … Continue reading
When to Hire: Our Next Big Task
If this first story sounds familiar, it is – I touched upon it in my Productive Output post. A few weeks ago the owner of a local large online retailer (approx 10x bigger than us) visited the warehouse. George worked for him prior to starting DI, and he based much of early DI off of this particular website. After seeing our shipping process on the back-end of our shopping cart, the owner turned George and his co-owner and said “I could fire two employees if I had that technology”. I unfortunately was not there to hear this, but upon getting … Continue reading
Warehouse Hockey
The long hours and constant stress of running a business are offset by the fact that after working a 12 hour day George and I can go back to the warehouse and play a fierce game of warehouse hockey at 10 PM…using our shipping dock as a goal.
Apparently Oil is Expensive and Burns Fast
Our heating adventure continues. When we moved we knew we had ~1,000 gallon oil tank, but when the oil company came and told us it was just short of full, we were happy to only put in 27 gallons. Then our heat went out after a few days in the warehouse. Four days later, the oil company came and essentially said “our bad, the tank was really empty last time we came” and put in 850 gallons. The bill for that fill up ran us just over $3k, but we figured it would last a while. Apparently not. We checked … Continue reading