How ISKN reduced operational costs and delivery times with fulfillment and reverse logistics of Salesupply

ISKN, the creator of the drawing tablet product category, faced significant delivery times, delivery - and return costs in one of its biggest markets, the USA. With the fulfillment and reverse logistics solution of Salesupply, ISKN not only solved these challenges, they also created a local flow for refurbishments.

Everybody has seen the devices that enable the user to have their pencil drawings appear both on paper and screen instantly. The French company ISKN, recently rebranded to AMI (Advanced Magnetic Interaction) developed this product category in 2013. After a successful Kickstarter campaign they quickly discovered the value of working with a specialised e-commerce fulfilment partner.    

Their challenge really just started after the Kickstarter campaign. ISKN only had a prototype at that time. They had to build the company, the team,operations and most importantly, the product itself. After personally arranging the fulfilment of the thousands products for their ´backers´, it was clear that they needed a partner to outsource the fulfilment process. 

“We moved to a specialised e-commerce warehouse in France but one big issue remained: apart from France the US was our main market,” says Clément Rosset, Head of Product Development and Operations at AMI. “Shipping products from China to France and after that individually to the US was both time consuming and costly. Even without taking reverse logistics into account.”

Plug and Play Fulfilment solution

“Salesupply was recommended by one of our logistic partners while we were trying to tackle the issue of product returns. When we discovered that Salesupply also had warehouses in the US in their global fulfilment network, we started working together.”

The connection between our Shopify account and the systems of Salesupply went very fast and in November 2017, right at the start of our peak season, we started local operations in the US with both fulfilment and reverse logistics.

“Right after that peak season we compared the results and the savings in logistics and the savings in reverse logistics were astonishing. I am not talking about €10k or €20k here, it was a very substantial cost saving.”

Value added reverse logistics

“I can't stress enough how important the reverse logistics process is for us. We are not selling fashion, our products are valuable electronic devices with a lot of tech involved.”

Before, they would send customers in the US a return label with a French address on it. Now ISKN could offer its clients a local US return address.

“We added a reverse logistics app to our Shopify account and enabled Salesupply to use it. Their team creates the labels and the customer sends the product to the US address. Upon arrival, Salesupply inspects the packages, reimburses the clients and runs specific software to test the products.” 

“The fact that Salesupply was able to take over this entire process of reverse logistics, testing, refurbishing and reimbursements, saves us costs and adds value to the whole process.“

Rebranding future AMI

During 2020 ISKN changed its name to AMI Advanced Magnetic Interaction. “With the rebranding we aim to make our core technology and knowhow available to other organisations. We will continue to produce and improve our Repaper and Slate products in a joint partnership with pencil producer Faber-Castell. We recently introduced a digital clutch pencil with them and you can expect more collaborations from AMI in the near future.”