Opportunities to grow

We’re closing in on a decade working alongside greetings card supplier, Thortful, and have never had more of an opportunity to grow with them.

On the back of Christmas and then Valentine’s Day, this is a vitally important week for our relationship with Thortful, as Mother’s Day approaches. It will potentially see up to 15 times the amount of daily volume we process for Thortful, compared to the average calendar week.

Thortful, which works with 4,000 independent creators and has more than 60,000 unique card designs, is an exclusively online retailer. In the last three years, the company has added gifts and flowers to its offering, too. And this is where we have the potential to grab some more business.

‘Thorful and Royal Mail have been working since day one and it’s one of our key three relationships,’ says Johannes Kloess, Thortful’s Head of Operations. ‘Almost 99% of everything we send goes through Royal Mail. Initially, we started just with cards and about 18 months ago launched Tracked 24 as well – giving us large letters and parcels through your next-day network.

‘For us, the unique ability Royal Mail has to produce great volumes on a daily basis and have them collected and delivered to all these postcodes is really quite special to us and our customers.

‘The Mother’s Day period gives us 10-15 times the volume on a day-by-day case, compared to non-peak times. It also involves dispatching and delivering at the weekend to a much higher extent. We’re producing 24/7 and Royal Mail increases their collections.

‘Our florist part of the business - that volume we don’t yet do with Tracked 24 – is something that we’re exploring for the near future. With the industrial dispute now out of the way and generally performance being where it needs to be, this is potentially something for next year, or later this year.

‘It means – if this Mother’s Day period goes well for us – then there are opportunities to grow our business with you. Twelve months ago, that wasn’t a conversation we were able to have.’

Thortful is a business constantly looking for ways to grow. And the value it places on the existing relationship we have together gives us a solid platform to grow with them.

Johannes cites teams at Sheffield Mail Centre and Yorkshire Distribution Centre – who are set for a busy week – as a strength in our relationship. It helped Thortful experience its best Christmas on record, something we can help them with for Mother’s Day now, too.

‘We were really quite happy with both First Class and Tracked 24 over Christmas,’ said Johannes, who also spoke with us in this film during peak.

‘Going forward, there’s a number of angles we want to explore. There is totally volume we could move from DPD to Royal Mail. There are also additional services we’re thinking about offering to customers – whether that’s Tracked 48 that we don’t offer now, or Second Class.

‘We’re trying to give the customers more choice – and there is a lot of choice at Royal Mail, which is great.’