About Flexi-Hex
Flexi-Hex is a sustainable packaging business founded in 2018 by brothers Will and Sam Boex. They supply plastic-free packaging for surfboards, bottles, and small fragile items.
The inspiration for Flexi-Hex came when Co-Founder Sam Boex purchased a surfboard online and it arrived wrapped in excessive amounts of bubble wrap. Sam and his brother Will decided something needed to be done about unsustainable packaging in the surfboard space.
But as Will explains, surfboards weren’t the only product being shipped without regard to environmental damage.
“One of the market sectors we focussed on was the drinks industry. A bottle is a similar shape to a surfboard, although slightly smaller. It worked really well.”
Trusted globally and growing at an accelerating pace, Flexi-Hex has seen much success since its initial launch. But with growth comes operational challenges.
Enter Unleashed, Prospect, and Mintsoft.
Challenges
In the beginning, like many new businesses, Flexi-Hex relied on an Excel spreadsheet for managing products.
Inevitably the lack of automation and a heavy reliance on human intervention left Flexi-Hex struggling to maintain accurate stock levels or operate efficiently.
“A lot of what we did was quite manual,” says Kieran Kite, Account Manager at Flexi-Hex, “in terms of having to go down to the warehouse, which was about a 20–30-minute drive away, and physically count stock and then report back to the office.
“There were a few instances where I might have miscounted and there was a lot of stock missing from our inventory reports.”
When stock discrepancies become a regular occurrence:
- Money is lost through stockouts, overstocking, and lost sales opportunities
- Customers become frustrated if what’s advertised as ‘in stock’ is unavailable
- Purchasing falls out of sync with customer demand and the needs of the business
- Time and resources are wasted on performing manual inventory counts
When these risks posed too great a threat to Flexi-Hex’s efficiency, they turned to Unleashed for automation and stock clarity.
The solution: Total inventory visibility with Unleashed
Unleashed inventory management software is a cloud-based system that delivers real-time updates and visibility across all your inventory levels, stock-on-hand values, and product costs.
Flexi-Hex required a reliable software tool that would save them those regular trips from the main office down to the warehouse while also ensuring the data in their inventory records matched reality.
After researching various inventory solutions, Flexi-Hex settled on Unleashed. Once the software was up and running in the business, the efficiency gains spoke for themselves.
“On Unleashed, we've got the mobility to set price breaks for quantities on certain products,” Kieran explains. “If customers order over a certain amount, their price automatically changes on the system which is very helpful for us when we're out and about. When you place the order, their pricing is automatically updated.”
Unleashed’s real-time inventory tracking and automated purchasing workflows help eliminate painful stock discrepancies and reduce the risk of stockouts or overstocking.
One feature Kieran and his team were particularly impressed by was Unleashed’s best-in-class batch tracking system.
“We can set which batch we want the stock to be picked from. So if we have someone ordering 1000 units of a certain product, we can specify which purchase order from our warehouse we want that to be picked from.”
An integrated trifecta of smart business solutions
Thanks to Unleashed, Flexi-Hex now has full control and visibility across any inventory coming in and out of the business.
But it wasn’t long before new challenges became apparent.
Will explains: “We quickly realised that we needed [to know] what our customers were buying, how they were buying it, and also managing our pipeline.”
Optimising customer relationship management with Prospect CRM
The team at Flexi-Hex knew they needed a good CRM system to get a clear view of customer behaviour.
“The most important thing is the integration. You can have one piece of amazing software and another piece of amazing software, but if they're not talking to each other, it becomes really frustrating to use.”
Prospect CRM is the leading stock-aware CRM system for B2B businesses. Even better, it integrates seamlessly with Unleashed.
Bella Collins, Marketing Director at Flexi-Hex, now uses Prospect to better understand their customers and make strategic, data-led decisions about their products.
“Since switching over to Prospect, it's a lot clearer to see if people have made previous contact.
“The dashboard shows me just who our loyal customers are and customers that are spending more than they were last year. We can see customers that should have ordered by now but haven't; it's clear when there's a drop off from accounts and we can rectify that quickly without it becoming a problem.”
Staying ahead of samples: Warehouse management made easy
With a solid inventory management system and CRM in place, there was only one challenge left to solve: aligning warehouse management with the rest of Flexi-Hex’s operations.
The final piece to the puzzle was Mintsoft: a cloud-based order fulfillment software that perfectly complements Unleashed and Prospect.
“We use Mintsoft to interact with our warehouse so they can pick samples and send them out for us,” Kieran says. “It makes it nice and straightforward; we can track exactly where the samples have been sent and when they've been delivered.
“Once the product has been signed for, it will appear as a PDF. We can download [that] and send it on to our customer to prove the stock has been delivered, and they can run that through invoicing.”
With all three systems in place and sharing data between different departments, Flexi-Hex is now in the perfect position to capitalise on new opportunities.
The result
Efficiency is everything for Flexi-Hex. With only 10 employees, an annual turnover above £1 million, and ambitious goals for the future of the business it was vital all three systems worked smoothly across multiple warehouses.
“We feel like we have the right systems,” says Will. “It's now just a matter of accelerating that growth through the years to come.”
Kieran adds: “The main benefit of having the full suite of products is the transparency across the business.”
Visibility has never been better. Reports are accurate and easily accessible. And Flexi-Hex is now in the perfect position to achieve that goal of successful international expansion.
Bella signs off by saying, “We love Prospect, we love Unleashed, and we love Mintsoft.”
