Packing Orders

Hey everyone!

For today’s blog post I thought I’d walk you through my packing orders routine! After big drops such as Mondays, I thought it may be of interest to go through the steps of which we pack, print and label etc - for anyone wanting to know a bit more of what goes on behind the scenes! 

Firstly though I’ll just give you all a wee update on me & the biz. It has all been so busy! I just finished uni for the semester on Friday and feel a huge weight off my shoulders. Currently I’m doing my honours in Communication Design at Massey, and the workload got really intense really quickly - it was a mission but hey, I got it done and it feels great. 

As you may know, on Monday we had our Sweats restock/drop and I am so grateful for everyone's orders. It never gets old seeing everyone hop on early and purchasing as soon as we hit the 5 o'clock mark. 

As it was a Monday drop, I flew back on Wednesday to send out your orders. It may have been slightly ambitious thinking we could send them all out in one day but we managed to get it done. This is all thanks to my beautiful friends Millie and Prue who came round and helped me fold, pack and ship orders after this drop. 

So, the process sort of looks like this: firstly we fold all the stock and organise it into colours and sizes (my kind of paradise). Then once everything is organised and ready to go online, we hit the go live button and all the orders come through on my shopify. For those of you who aren’t familiar with shopify, it’s an online ecommerce platform that is used for websites and online stores all over the world and it is SO easy to run. It organises everything for you and it is quite simple to get the hang of once you hit the ground running (highly recommend using it for the back end of your shop!) 

Once the orders have all come through, we print all the packing slips and start to build the orders. The packing slips include the customers name, as well as the item and quantity of what they ordered. We use the packing slips to find the items organised in the stock cupboard and stack them all up. It looks a bit like this:

After we have organised all the orders and matched the products with their customer, we bag the orders up. As you know sustainability is at the forefront of every decision we make at Stella Claire, so we try to keep the packaging as simple as possible. Firstly we use compostable or recycled packaging by R3 pack to put the orders in - my personal favourite bag is the compostable as it's more malleable and easy to fit the products in. I also have the most gorgeous recyclable mailers from Kind Packaging at the moment, which are so cute and colourful and add to the excitement of receiving an order. 

We have also just started to include the cutest stickers from StickerDot which are personalised to Stella Claire. These stickers are great as you get to pop them on whatever you’d like - your drink bottle, laptop, phone case - you name it. I picked the Vinyl stickers as they are a bit more durable and are waterproof. I’m thinking of ordering plenty more die cut stickers and having little sticker packs you can purchase online… Let me know if this is something you’d be interested in! If you have a small business or are even just after some stickers for yourself you should definitely check out their website they also do personalised business cards and swing tags. 

After we have packaged up the orders with their stickers we seal them up and put the packing slip on top so we know who the order belongs to. Once all the orders are sealed up we begin the label printing process. 

Originally this was hard work as I didn’t have my own eShip account connected to my shopify, so we had to manually copy and paste all the addresses and names into eShip to print the labels. Now though, we have this all going so the process is incredibly simple. Now all of my new orders automatically load into eShip and all you need to do is select the bag size. Once the bag size is selected, we print the label and match the name to the order. 

Then we put another sticker from StickerDot on the front of your package so you can identify it from us at a glimpse - then that’s it! The orders are all ready to be collected by the courier. 

I love being able to make this process sustainable and there is honestly nothing more exciting than seeing a package at your door that is easily identifiable while also personalising the experience for Stella Claire! 

Thanks for reading, be sure to flick me a message on instagram or over email if you have any further questions! Be sure to checkout StickerDot through their links below:

Have a great day everyone,

Stella