Horzehoods Ride Ahead with Faster, Smarter Fulfilment

Founded in 2013, Horzehoods is a UK-based equestrian brand created by riders, for riders. The brand focuses on creating innovative, high-performance gear that improves everyday riding experiences, from clothing that keeps riders comfy and stylish whether they’re mucking out or enjoying a casual hack, to a specialist competition collection that has horses and riders alike looking their best and feeling their most confident. 

Horzehoods has built a loyal following, with glowing reviews on Google and Trustpilot and repeat customers who keep coming back. This reflects not only the quality of their gear, but also their commitment to exceptional customer service – including thank-you cards for the riders, accompanied by polos for the horses – and ongoing product development informed by customer feedback.

But as demand grew and order volumes increased, there was one hurdle that Horzehoods couldn’t jump: shipping and fulfilment. 

Outsourcing to a 3PL would have solved the volume problem – but at the cost of control, flexibility, and the personal touches that define the brand. Horzehoods didn’t want to hand their customer experience to someone else. Instead, the challenge was finding a way to scale fulfilment in-house, without adding complexity, cost, or compromising the customer experience.

Challenge

“Our biggest struggle was with how time consuming it was to create shipping labels, and as the volume of orders grew, we noticed it more.” 

Shipping orders via Royal Mail Click & Drop had been enough to get Horzehoods started, but as orders ramped up, the software began to struggle to keep pace, with growth at risk of grinding to a halt.

When exploring their next step, they discovered that overhauling fulfilment and shipping could be time-consuming and costly, especially with complex WMS setups. Outsourcing to a 3PL was an option, but it came with the risk of greatly increased costs, losing control over their shipping processes and their carefully crafted customer experience – no more thank-you notes, and no more polos for ponies!

Doing nothing carried its own risks: growth would stall as Horzehoods faced a range of challenges:

• A team swamped in admin: As orders rapidly increased, manual tasks such as label creation became a noticeable drain on time.
• An overwhelm of orders during peak: High order volumes put pressure on the dispatch team, leading to an increase in inefficiencies, such as missed opportunities for merging orders. 
• A process that can’t keep up: Fulfilment simply wasn’t able to scale at the same rate as Horzehoods’ growing demand.

Solution

“Zenstores saved lots of time that we have then been able to put into other areas of the business that needed more focus. It allows us to fulfil more orders in a day, meaning we’ve been able to speed up dispatch times and deliver a better experience for our customers. Overall, using this has made us more efficient.”

So, Horzehoods were caught between a rock and a hard place: do nothing and keep riding the Click & Drop chaos, invest excessive time and money into a complex WMS setup, or outsource to a 3PL, losing control of their processes. Luckily, they found Zenstores. 

Zenstores proved the perfect solution. 

Integrations with Shopify and Royal Mail were simple to set up, and are both fast and robust enough to handle even the busiest of days. The kanban workflow was easy to learn, teach and use day to day. Orders imported into Zenstores with the correct shipping services already applied - minimising errors, and making it super quick to batch print shipping labels. 

Overall Zenstores had turned one of the most admin heavy and time consuming parts of their ecommerce operation into the fastest and most scalable part. 

One standout feature for the Horzehoods team was order merging.

With this, the team could easily spot if a customer had placed multiple orders, merge them, and print a single label so the orders could be shipped together – something that was easy to miss during peak periods. 

This not only saved time but also cut shipping costs significantly. By avoiding multiple parcels for the same customer, Horzehoods saved hundreds of pounds per month, while ensuring customers received all their items together, keeping the delivery experience smooth and professional.

With faster, more efficient workflows in place, Horzehoods could dispatch more orders each day and consistently offer quicker turnaround times, giving the team a smoother ride from checkout to dispatch.

How Zenstores supports Horzehoods’ fulfilment:

• Faster label creation: Shipping labels are printed in batch quickly and easily, saving valuable time.
• Order merging: Multiple orders for the same customer are easily identified and combined.
• Quicker dispatch: Enables the team to fulfil more orders per day, even during busy periods.
• Improved efficiency: Staff can focus on other areas of the business as order volumes grow.
• Responsive support: Friendly, knowledgeable support with responses from a team who know shipping and fulfilment.
  

Results

“Fulfilment now takes less than half the time, and Zenstores has allowed us to be more efficient as our order volume grows, positively impacting our plan for the future as we have a good system in place to support our predicted growth.” 

Since switching to Zenstores, Horzehoods’ fulfilment process now takes less than half the time it did previously. 

Orders move at a steady gallop, helping the team maintain their goal of same-day dispatch – and exceed customer expectations. The impact is clear in customer feedback, with customers frequently commenting on how fast their orders arrive. 

Shipping with Zenstores has given Horzehoods confidence that their fulfilment setup can keep pace with future growth.