Outdoor Retail · Northbound Outdoor
We replaced four manual handoffs in their order-to-fulfillment chain with a single automation and an AI assistant — freeing their ops lead to focus on growth instead of data entry.
Northbound is a fast-growing outdoor brand with a small but mighty operations team. They were drowning in the gap between their Shopify storefront, their fulfillment partner, their accounting tool, and their customer service inbox.
Every order touched a human at least four times before it shipped — copying numbers between systems, re-keying addresses, manually flagging exceptions. Their ops lead was spending most of her week on data entry instead of running the operation.
We spent the first week shadowing the actual workflow rather than reading their process docs. Most of what we found wasn't in any document.
Then we shipped two things:
"CoolNerd took a process that was eating 20 hours a week off our admin's plate and turned it into a five-minute review. We hired them for SEO and ended up rebuilding half our back office."
The ops lead now spends one daily review block — about 30 minutes — to confirm the day's automation ran clean and resolve the rare exception. The rest of her time goes back into category management and partner sourcing, which is what we hired her to do in the first place.
The numbers from the first 90 days:
Now that the rails are clean, the next layer is more interesting: predictive restocking based on order velocity and weather data, and a customer-facing product finder powered by the same assistant that's now handling support.
Let's build
Free 30-minute consultation. We'll map the system, the savings, and the shortest path to live.
Book a consultation →