Manual fulfillment and international barriers were holding Slow Love back from scaling their
knitwear business, wasting them time and money. Printing 100 labels would take them 7 hours
before Shiptheory and Swap, it now takes just 30 minutes—a 14× faster workflow that enables
global expansion with the click of a button.
The challenge
From Manual Fulfillment to 14× Faster Shipping
Can you give us some background on slow love?
The brand started in June 2022 by the founder Holly, founder with a background in marketing and ecommerce startups. The first product was the “Feel Good Jumper”—the blueprint, which really took off. We started with a very small collection, as the hand-knitting takes time, and we reduce waste by only commissioning a few jumpers at once.
We now sell a much broader collection, but still only online using Shopify through our website. We don't have any physical shops. We’re based in the UK, but now ship to people all over the world.
Talk us through your shipping process back then.
Before Shiptheory and Swap, we manually processed orders via the Royal Mail website. We could only do 10 labels at a time, and each batch used to take 40 minutes. We’d have to copy and paste the names, order numbers and addresses, and then wait for the generation of the tracking code.
Printing and packing on top of that was really hindering the growth of the business. We had to use a clunky and confusing platform with our previous carrier before Swap, going back-and-forth between all the different platforms, the whole process took us about 3 hours a day. We knew we had to find a platform.
The Solution
Enter Swap & Shiptheory
How did Shiptheory change that process?
Since we signed up to Shiptheory, it’s integrated directly into our Royal Mail online Business account, so we can generate labels automatically. As soon as we fulfill an order in Shopify, the information is sent through Shiptheory to Royal Mail. You can imagine how much time we’ve
saved—it used to take us 40 minutes to print 10 labels, now we can print well over 100 in less than that.
How easily we’ve been able to customise our specific rules for each shipment has been a game changer for us, especially for international orders. When we’ve sent free tote bags with large orders before, they would get flagged and rejected by customs. Shiptheory allows us to
categorise those items automatically, so you don’t get penalised for sending free stuff, and you don’t have to deal with rejected parcels and costly shipping mistakes.
What enabled you to expand internationally?
Swap has made our global reach exponentially easier. Using Swap Global for our international customers allows us to tie up shipping price, product price and duties all into one on the website. With duties paid, it’s much more palatable for the customer, they don’t have to worry about this big complex breakdown of prices.
The Swap implementation allows seamless international delivery through Shopify, by covering all the invoicing and logistics for you. It makes no difference on our end if we’re sending to Australia, the US or Bristol, it’s all the same click of a button—Swap handles the global tax filing and duty drawback.
Swap offers the whole package for international commerce. I’ve not found anyone that is offering the same thing.
I don’t think we would have scaled globally the way we have if it wasn’t for Swap and Shiptheory.
CHAR BODILY
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGER @ SLOW LOVE KNITWEAR
The Results
A clear win
Would you recommend Swap and Shiptheory to other scaling businesses?
Absolutely. Shiptheory and Swap work seamlessly together, integrating commerce and shipping logistics automatically in the background of our workflow. Now that Swap handles our returns process, we're dealing with about 80% less emails from returns admin and cross-platform communications.
Since using both platforms, the message from the start was “don’t worry, we’re working together to sort this out for you, you won’t need to do anything.”
I can’t stress enough how excellent the customer support has been with Shiptheory. They're always ready to answer the phone, always with a can-do-attitude. It was never ‘we can’t do that’, it was always ‘how can we make this happen?’ I don’t think we would have scaled globally the way we have if it wasn’t for Swap and Shiptheory. We’re so grateful to have you guys as a part of the journey!
