How operations heavy DTC brand Sola Wood Flowers utilizes Malomo to pull back the curtain of order delivery progress to customers

Sola Wood Flowers is a Utah-based company that sells sola wood flowers, wedding flowers and other arts and crafts supplies and they’re revolutionizing what order tracking means in the floral industry. In the floral industry, accurately predicting estimated delivery and timelines are especially important as customers are typically planning for a major life event, such as a wedding.

DTC experts Alex Ledoux & Mehtab Bhogal, Co-Founders of Karta Ventures, the parent company of Sola Wood Flowers, faced a new challenge beginning to operate Sola Wood Flowers: production times and carrier delays left customers in the dark and anxious while waiting for their arrangements. The flower business is stressful enough, working with wedding parties and event planners with strict deadlines. Given the tight 15 day fulfillment window for custom orders and the usual delays seen with shipping carriers, manually keeping customers in the know was leading to a customer success nightmare.

It was imperative for their customer success team to keep customers looped in during production. But with Sola Wood Flowers’ process before Malomo, that translated into a lot of hand holding for their customers- from order fulfillment all the way to carriers. Think Domino’s pizza preparation tracker only that instead of the delivery timeline being 30 minutes, it's typically weeks. That’s a lot of time to handle order tracking on an individual basis.

So, the Sola Wood Flowers team investigated some alternative solutions to help alleviate the burden order tracking was placing on their team. That’s when we teamed up to not only help solve their industry-related concerns and put the control of the post-purchase experience back in their team’s hands, but turn order tracking from a cost-center into a revenue channel.

In addition to the typical order notification status updates Malomo recommends that brands send out to all customers (such as order confirmed, in transit, out for delivery, and delivered), Sola Wood Flowers also set up automated delivery exception notifications with Malomo’s Klaviyo triggers to their customers. This ensures that when and if delivery exceptions happen, customers are the first to know about it (without an extra burden on your customer service team).

Out of the box, Malomo’s “stalled in fulfillment” event was a powerful tool used to proactively notify customers ONLY for placed orders that had not been fulfilled in a certain time frame. For example, if the original delivery estimate was 5 days but there is now a delivery delay and that original delivery timeline is no longer correct, Malomo’s “stalled in fulfillment” event trigger would then send an email to your customer to let them know of the updated delivery timeline.

For the Sola Wood Flowers team, this automated process saved their team from answering frustrated and confused customers when their delivery was delayed. To continue the Domino’s analogy, think, “your flowers were just put in the oven, we’ll let you know once they’re cooked and with the delivery driver”.

Vice President of Growth at Sola Wood Flowers, Campbell Donohue, puts it best, “Malomo has enabled us to drastically reduce our "where is my order" customer requests, therefore lessening the burden on our customer service team. To do so, we built custom flows with their seamless Klaviyo (ESP) integration to reach out and inform customers of their custom orders status proactively.”

By setting up Malomo’s “stalled in fulfillment” event trigger, Sola Wood Flowers reduced shipping related support tickets during the fulfillment process and increased overall engagement with their customers. It’s a win-win for all parties involved- customers know exactly where their order is and are shown relevant recommendations while Sola Wood Flowers’ team is relieved of stress around order tracking.

And this increased customer engagement led to more sales and conversions from cross- and upselling on their order tracking page.

Campbell notes, “Malomo has enabled us to have an additional 36,625 customer touch points [In Q1 ‘23]”. These additional purchases amount to a 64x ROI on the original investment in Malomo & an attributed revenue increase of .53%. By saving spending and time, Sola Wood Flowers is keeping their customers and their team informed and happy.

In the often crowded Shopify Ecosystem, Malomo stood out to the Sola Wood Flowers team because of the adaptability of Malomo’s software and the customization possibilities. The Sola Wood Flowers team already was sending production milestones into Shopify and Klaviyo, which made it even easier for them to integrate Malomo into their existing workflows and tech stack. Thus, resulting in being able to actively update customers on production timelines and keep wedding parties happy leading up to their big day.