Holly Keir is brand and marketing manager for eg. Free Range Eggs.
“I love waking up in the morning and seeing all the orders from Upstock going, ‘Ping!, there's another New World that’s just come onboard or a new hospo customer’. It's so exciting.”
Before eg. started automating their wholesale ordering on Upstock, Holly needed to track down the orders or wait for them to get passed along.
“If I wanted to know what stores we were in I'd have to ask someone directly, and obviously there’s lots going on at the farm. And so now with Upstock, I see the notifications come through, and it's like, we're in Devonport now. Perfect, I can do an Instagram post saying, ‘Hey, Devonport, have you seen our eggs?’”
Now she has the information instantly she can push publicity exactly where and when it’s needed.
“Upstock is perfect. Every day I'm seeing new wholesale customers come through and I just add to my list where to do the next social post or update our website on where we’re being stocked. And it's simply because of those Upstock notifications. It's honestly so easy. I love it so much.”
On the farm, sales account manager, Sam Gilman uses Upstock to keep the team and their customers working in unison.
“Before Upstock, it was all manual. We had a triple-page docket book, a bit of Word and Google sheets for Foodstuffs then we looked at it and we thought, ‘damn, this is going to take us forever if we want to create packing slips and do invoicing’. So we had to streamline it in a way that made it simpler.”
eg. Free Range Eggs has experience exceptional growth, which it directly links to the ease and practicality of Upstock for both the business and its customers.
"Upstock is a no-brainer! The ability to seamlessly integrate with our accounting and customer software saves us countless hours within our operations, logistics and accounting teams! We’ve seen tremendous growth within our business which is directly linked to the ease and practicality of Upstock for both us and our customers."
Sam says he now saves up to two hours a day on invoicing, by automating everything using the Foodstuffs and Xero integrations in Upstock. As they scale up, they plan on getting even more value from some other powerful features in Upstock.
“We've only got one warehouse at this stage. But if we open other warehouses in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland we will end up doing stock transfers. Upstock’s feature that automates all that is definitely a function that we’ll need as we grow”
More from out chat with Holly Keir and Sam Gilman from eg. Free Range Eggs:
Why did you start using Upstock?
Holly: Implementing a system like Upstock was really a no-brainer for us! The ability to seamlessly integrate the system with our accounting and customer software has saved us countless hours within the operations, logistics and accounting teams. The app is extremely user-friendly and gives us the ability to manage all orders from our devices out and about and on the farm. Everything is in one place and it all makes sense, plus it’s free for our customers to use. The Upstock team is readily available, taking phone and video calls to assist with any queries we have.
How has Upstock simplified your orders?
Sam: On any given day we could be spending an hour or two just doing orders making sure they’re correct, double-checking everything, making sure pricing's all set properly. But with Upstock, pricing's already set beforehand and it's just a couple of clicks and the packing slip is done. Also once we've shipped it's automatically invoiced in Xero as well. It’s been really good for us.
Tell us about your business and your brand
Holly: At eg. The chicken comes first! From day one we have been an exclusive free-range egg farm, and we are working hard every day to lead by example and pave a sustainable future for egg farming in New Zealand. The eg. farm was designed from our hens' perspective because when the chicken comes first they, in turn, lay perfect eggs. Transparency is a high priority for us and ensuring our hens feel the sun on their feathers and grass beneath their feet is something we want our customers to know about. We sell directly to consumer via our website, but we are mainly targeting the wholesale side of things. So chefs, restaurants, hotels, catering companies, schools, rest homes and supermarkets.
What are your future plans?
Holly: We're exclusively free range and we currently have 90,000 free-range hens, but we have 240 hectares of land. Our future goal is to have over half a million free-range chicks and all of them will be free range. Quite often, egg farms have a variety of different types of chickens because of the land limitations, but we'll be exclusively free-range to a massive scale.
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