How did the company start and what is your story?
Antica Macelleria Falorni is a company that produces and exports artisan meats and cold cuts all over the world. The company was founded in 1806 in Greve in Chianti, a small town in the province of Florence. With the current owners there has been a real expansion: from a village store to a company that exports its handmade products in Europe and the rest of the world.
How did you go from an offline company to a hybrid company both offline and online?
Our physical point of sale has always benefited from a particularly attractive location, especially for tourists coming from Switzerland and Germany, but more in general for the whole flow of enogastronomical tourism gravitating around Chianti.
Tourists were our first importers: they allowed us to make our products known abroad.
Then came online. Even before the pandemic we had already decided to set up our e-commerce. At that time we expanded our production volumes while maintaining our size and artisanal production methods.
Currently, the e-commerce is aimed mostly at an Italian clientele, mainly because before opening to the international market we wanted to consolidate our business locally and also use it to validate our idea of selling handmade products.
We decided to target only Italian customers, because the online world is still something new for us and we want to consolidate this business before opening up to the rest of Europe and the world.
So the project started small, but with the emergence of the health emergency and the consequent imposition of the lockdown we had a real boom: requests increased exponentially.
What was your shipping process like before using Sendcloud and how has it improved with our software?
Before relying on Sendcloud, each shipment was handled manually. Once we received the order, we would go to the website of each courier (especially DHL and Bartolini) and create waybills by entering all the shipping data manually. For every single order.
With the automatic printing of waybills, transcription errors are avoided that cause non-delivery and loss of the order. This has also solved considerable headaches for our managers who had to recover the error and assist customers who had not received the goods.
We also use Sendcloud's functionality for sending tracking notifications which is definitely a much-loved solution by our customers as well for they can be updated in real time about the delivery. For those of us who deliver mostly fresh food products, on-time delivery is essential. As is delivering the package when the customer is home to pick it up. We can't afford shipments in storage, we would risk making our products go bad.
Have you relied on a partner to develop your online business?
Very important for our growth has been the collaboration with X-PORT, which since the end of 2020 has helped us to open our store on Amazon and to give a more international scope to our e-commerce.
X-PORT also introduced us to Sendcloud, with which we started managing our product shipments in the Netherlands. We had a great experience with Sendcloud right away and to this day all orders coming out of our warehouse, domestic and international, are processed with your shipping software.
Link al case study: https://www.sendcloud.it/clienti/falorni/