Find out how Café Royal transformed its logistics challenges into growth opportunities thanks to its innovative partnership with logistician M&L and the strategic use of Shippingbo technology.
In a world where speed and efficiency are paramount, fast-growing brands face major logistics challenges that can hinder or accelerate their growth. Logistics outsourcing has become a strategic lever for companies wishing to focus on their core business while ensuring optimal supply chain management. This article explores how Café Royal, a dynamic coffee brand, leveraged its partnership with M&L and Shippingbo’s technology to meet its growing logistics needs and reinforce its commitment to sustainability and customer service excellence.
Why did Café Royal choose to outsource its logistics?
In the cut-throat world of e-commerce, the real conductor of the orchestra is not the CEO or the senior executive, but the logistician. It’s the logistician who manages the vital interactions between a company and its customers. When Café Royal launched its B2B division, the company already possessed solid expertise in the digital and commercial fields, but lacked specific skills in logistics. Faced with this gap, and aware of the crucial importance of logistics in the e-commerce sector as the “sinews of war”, the decision to team up with a logistics partner from the outset was an obvious one.
Opting for logistics outsourcing wasn’t just a choice of circumstance, it was also a strategy that enabled Café Royal to concentrate fully on developing its brand. By entrusting logistics management to experts, Café Royal benefited from the peace of mind provided by specialist know-how, while avoiding the costs and challenges associated with running a warehouse and employing dedicated staff.
The outsourcing strategy was accompanied by judicious partnership choices. Café Royal preferred to collaborate with emerging players in the logistics field rather than drown in the mass of established leaders. This approach enabled them not only to benefit from more personalized attention, but also to take advantage of innovative technologies and operational agility that smaller but dynamic partners like Shippingbo are often better able to offer.
Why M&L and Shippingbo?
The collaboration between Café Royal and M&L is not just a matter of strategic choices, but also a genuine meeting of shared visions and ambitions. During in-depth discussions with M&L management, it became clear that both parties shared a common goal: to develop and expand their businesses. This convergence of goals naturally led to a dynamic partnership, where learning and evolution were mutual, and where the gamble was taken to grow together.
Initially, this partnership focused on the management of small order volumes, with the hope and ambition of escalating to the management of much larger volumes. It was in this context that M&L introduced Shippingbo as a logistics solution. At first, our main question was how to understand and integrate Shippingbo technology. Our technological curiosity quickly turned into conviction when we discovered how this API could be seamlessly integrated into our digital ecosystem.
What distinguishes our approach from that of traditional e-commerce is our “pull” business model, where we actively reach out to the customer rather than waiting for them to come to us. This is reflected in our e-commerce site, which is not simply a shop window, but an interactive tool for creating and sending personalized shopping baskets. Shippingbo, with its flexible API and adaptability, has become a central element of this strategy, enabling fluid management of logistics operations tailored to our unique needs.
Supporting Café Royal’s growth: what are the challenges?
Accompanying Café Royal through its intense growth phase presents particular challenges, but also exciting opportunities for any logistician. The first challenge lies in preserving agility while maintaining a human-scale structure, which is crucial to offering high-quality customer service and adapting rapidly to market changes.
- Adapting to the market and quality of service: for Café Royal, it is essential to keep in step with its customers’ expectations and requirements in terms of quality, cost and delivery times. This implies exceptional responsiveness to new market opportunities and innovative solutions that our customers may request.
- Skills and tools development: this includes ongoing training and skills upgrading, as well as updating internal IT tools and improving infrastructures. Shippingbo helped integrate serial number management and shipment traceability functions, which were not initially present in their offer, but are now standard, reflecting a co-construction with Café Royal.
- Responsiveness and customized solutions: adapting logistics solutions to Café Royal was crucial, including customizing connectivity with their ERP systems to manage supplier and product specificities. Warehouse space organization was also optimized to improve product flow management and maximize space utilization.
- Sustainability and CSR: in the current context, where social and environmental responsibility (SER) issues are increasingly important, integrating these aspects into logistics strategy is a major challenge. For Café Royal, this means aligning its growth operations with sustainable practices.
- Marketplace integration: the ability to synchronize effectively with various marketplaces and sales platforms is critical to Café Royal’s success. Shippingbo’s flexibility in plug-and-play integration with these platforms has enabled Café Royal to deploy across a wide range of sales channels, ensuring an extensive and diverse commercial presence.
How do M&L and Café Royal interact?
As part of their collaboration, M&L and Café Royal have set up a series of operational routines to ensure efficient, responsive project management. Interactions between the two entities are characterized by daily communication: every day, exchanges take place to track packages, dealing with incidents such as late deliveries, incorrect goods, or product returns. These daily interactions are crucial to maintaining the uninterrupted flow of logistics and responding rapidly to any unforeseen events.
In addition to these daily contact points, M&L and Café Royal hold weekly and monthly meetings. These regular meetings enable us to review current operations, analyze performance, and discuss possible improvements. These meetings are essential for adjusting short-term strategies and planning effectively according to demand forecasts.
Proximity is a key element of this relationship, with a conscious effort to maintain a single point of contact to simplify communication and enhance responsiveness. More formal operational reviews also take place on an annual or biannual basis, where discussions focus on long-term strategy, pricing adjustments and overall improvements. This relationship management model ensures that day-to-day operations run smoothly, and reinforces the strategic partnership between M&L and Café Royal. This enables the coffee brand to continue to develop and innovate in a competitive market.
Café Royal: how can Shippingbo be used?
Café Royal takes full advantage of Shippingbo’s capabilities, using the platform extensively to orchestrate its day-to-day logistics operations. One of the crucial aspects of their use concerns inventory management, a daily activity that requires constant accuracy and updating. Precise stock location, in particular, is vital for the company, especially given the diversity of their products, which include not only consumables, but also coffee machines.
Managing the serial numbers of these machines is particularly important, as each machine can have several life cycles, from customers to returns for repair or replacement. In addition to inventory management, Shippingbo is also central to Café Royal’s after-sales service. Every day, the teams check and track up to 300 parcels, including those shipped via major platforms such as Amazon.
This functionality is essential not only for logistics tracking, but also for maintaining smooth, continuous interaction with customers. Thanks to Shippingbo, Café Royal is able to effectively combine logistics management with warehouse and merchandise management, making this solution an indispensable tool at the heart of their organization.
How does Shippingbo benefit M&L?
Shippingbo’s contribution to M&L has proved to be a considerable asset, both operationally and organizationally. From an operational point of view, Shippingbo is remarkably quick and easy to learn. With little training required, M&L’s teams are quickly up and running, enabling them to adapt efficiently to the diverse demands of their customers. This ability to easily use the tool after only a few orders underlines its ergonomics and efficiency.
Organizationally, Shippingbo plays a central role at M&L, bringing together all orders and customer interactions in one place. This includes the management of various sales platforms, multiple stock levels, as well as the coordination of shipments for multiple customers and channels. This integration gives M&L a clear and precise overview of the business, facilitating order preparation and transport management.
Moreover, Shippingbo has become the backbone of M&L’s business, acting not only as an essential day-to-day tool, but also as a true strategic partner. This collaboration is not limited to the provision of technology, but extends to the development of new markets and the acquisition of new customers, underlining joint growth and an enriched network of logisticians and partners. This strategic partnership enables M&L to offer solutions that are increasingly adapted to the emerging needs of their customers, whether they are expanding or launching a new activity.
How are Café Royal and M&L faring?
The current year marks a significant milestone for Café Royal, characterized by impressive growth and heightened environmental awareness. The figures speak for themselves: the company is forecasting an annual increase in volumes of over 50%, testifying to the brand’s ambition and sustained growth momentum.
This growth is not limited to increased sales figures; it is accompanied by a strengthened commitment to sustainable practices. Indeed, Café Royal, in collaboration with its logistics partners, strives to optimize parcel shipping frequency to minimize its carbon footprint, underlining the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in its day-to-day operations.
For M&L, the results are equally positive. With 36% annual growth in orders over the past five years, M&L has demonstrated its ability to keep pace with its customers, while maintaining impeccable quality of service. By the end of May, M&L had already processed 52,000 orders, not only for Café Royal, but for all its customers, with an average preparation time of less than 24 hours.
Forecasts for the year stand at 120,000 orders, reflecting robust momentum. M&L relies on its 12 years of experience to offer its customers a personalized service, with each customer having a single point of contact, reinforcing proximity and ease of management.
Find out what M&L and Café Royal have to say in an exclusive webinar:
