Slow Love knitwear is a sustainable knitwear brand based in cirencester. They have made the perfect everyday jumper each one individually hand knitted to the best standard.
Slow Love Interview
We chatted to Isobel to find out the ins and outs of their business and how Shiptheory have helped them scale
Q: Give us some background on the Slow Love Knitwear story
Slow love knitwear started in June 2022 by the founder Holly, who is a super stylish lady and has always had this amazing idea.
The first jumper is the “feel good jumper”. That's the OG and it did REALLY well. We started with a very very small collection and with just the feel good jumper and two colorways. This is because each one is individually hand knitted. The production of them obviously has to be quite thought out and well timed because of how long they take to make, not a single part of them as machine knitted. This is a real unique selling point as they are made with care and love which makes them look and feel different to normal high street jumpers. We try to reduce waste as much as possible by only commissioning a few jumpers at a time
They are all individually hand knitted in Hong Kong where we have a really great relationship with the people out there which we are really proud of and makes the garments even more special when we receive them.
Q: Where do you sell these jumpers?
We are a completely online business and we don't have any physical shops. We often bounce around the idea of having kind of pop-ups here and there, but at the moment, it's all online and that suits us perfectly. We use Shopify as our e-commerce store of choice which Shiptheory allows us to connect to our carriers - Royal Mail 24 tracked and DHL for bigger orders.
Q: What's the team behind the brand of Slow Love like?
We are an all women team which we love. There's so much support and love for each other. We are always coming up with new ideas to better the business. With such a small team of 5 of us with the newest designer just graduating we are loving the happy supportive ethos.
Q: What did your workflow look like before Shiptheory?
Before we found Shiptheory, we manually processed everything via the Royal Mail website. We could only ever do 10 labels at a time, and each ten labels used to take between 30 to 40 minutes. We would have to manually copy and paste all of the names, order number and address.
Then wait for Royal Mail to generate the tracking code and then we had to paste the tracking code from the Royal Mail website into our Shopify page which then eventually update the customer.
Me or Holly would do the labels while the other one packed, the packing would be so slow because they’d be waiting on the labels to generate, it was super inefficient. We would have to set aside time just to do labels instead of focussing on the core parts of the business. However now with Shiptheory these two man job seems like a distant memory. It's now a quick one man job without any stress saving us time and financial savings. .
Q: HOW DOES SHIPTHEORY FIT INTO YOUR WORKFLOW?
Shiptheory is integrated directly into our Royal Mail Online Business Account we just fulfil orders in Shopify and the label generation is completely automated.
Our labels used to take us 40 minutes to print 10 and now we could print 100 in less than that time. Its so great that even if we are all working remotely, I am still able to manage and fulfil orders and get them to print in the office for the others to sort, there is just never a hold up anymore. Having all this in place has really allowed us to expand our social media platforms and release new products.
Q:What do you like most about working with Shiptheory?
I would have to say the support team, they are amazing and a real asset. Their response times are great and are always really friendly if I don't understand something. I've had multiple chats with support to sort out simple things which I couldn't do myself and they are always resolved within minutes.
I would also have to mention I love using Shiptheory because of how easy the interface and dashboard is to use. It’s so user friendly. You often come across solutions with really confusing interfaces which are not fun to have to spend time learning how to use.
Q: What drew you to Shiptheory?
I was definitely doing a lot of research into how these sorts of integrations work and how we can set them up. I think I saw that you guys were based In Bristol, I was like WOW down the road to me what a good fit. Then the next steps were so smooth and simple, within minutes I was on the phone with Josh who explained the situation and how it would work within our workflow. After this we set up the free trail and now we couldn't survive without it.