New Year, New Provider: How QIWI scaled 16x after switching to OTW Shipping

I started QIWI in February of 2020. It was born out of a need for my own personal anxiety medication. Being prescribed 400mg of Adderall a day and doing that for 6 months... I quit that cold turkey. After that, I developed really severe mental health disorders (stress and anxiety disorders). Medical cannabis was helpful, however, I am very sensitive to THC and I can't spend my days getting high when I need to treat my anxiety. It's like one evil or the other evil. So essentially, I had to create my own medicine.

 

I found medicinal weed without THC and then I addressed every possible factor I could in terms of what is my dream product. I don't want to have to roll this up myself, I want it to be like cigarettes. I want 20 of these in a pack. It's the highest quality flower I can get and it's the best flavor profile. Basically, I am just creating my perfect product. It's filling a massive demand that has just existed and no one else has really taken on the burden of the bottom-up structure. They [other CBD companies] grow into the market, they buy cheap flower, and they go to market. Our advantage thankfully is because it is such a personal project in a sense [...] so much thought was put into this product.

​

It's also the burden of I'm going to take the harder road. None of our customers are going to know what CBG is unless we educate them. The education of your potential customers before that conversion is the death sentence to many other companies.

​

In terms of fulfillment, we initially started with Shipmonk. Prior to going with them, the decision was quite clear. It was balancing the utility of outsourcing it with the cost. I was okay with paying a nice premium, especially in the beginning. Why? In a company's early days, the calculation is simple. It's basically, how much would it cost for me to run fulfillment myself? I'll have all these employees, and you break it down to your forecasted volume, and then you go crap... it makes a lot more sense for me to scale up with a 3PL. Maybe at a certain point, we'll cross that threshold where our volume of orders is so high that what we pay the warehouse is enough to cover double the team we would have plus the rent and overhead expenses. So it becomes the question, how long will I be able to have this partnership before the cost offset is just too high.

​

We started with Shipmonk so we could scale up with them... unfortunately there was basically no service. You can't get a response in under 2 days. Costs were quite high itself, but when you do the math [...] I'm paying this premium for what? Just to get ignored for 2 days when we're having an inventory crisis and retailers trying to double-check something? They took on no accountability, no liability, and when that is such an instrumental outsourced part of your supply chain... that's like a whole 25% of the entire supply chain and that's the one that brings the revenues. That's the one final point where you release the product into their final authority and you trust that the transaction is completed by them. Unfortunately I didn't have that reliability with these guys.