Roshambo Shades is family owned and operated by San Diego family Scott, Julia, and their little girls Avery and Chloe. Starting in 2012 as a response to needs within their own family, Roshambo prides themselves on making sunglasses and direct-to-consumer prescription eyewear for children (think Warby Parker for kids!) that are safe, durable, and flexible, but at a budget-friendly price. They have now grown to five sizes of frames from baby to adult so the whole family can match. Lack of quality in kids eyewear was the biggest motivator in creating their own line. To address this, they make their frames in Italy, assemble them in house in San Diego, use polarized lenses as a standard, and created a proprietary, toxin-free, kid safe material that is virtually unbreakable.  

In addition, Roshambo proudly contributes a portion of all their sales to an autism charity. Their company name is a reference to the children’s game “rock, paper, scissors” also called “ro-sham-bo,” which is used as a teaching tool for children with autism. With autism present in their own family, this is an important pillar of their business.

The Challenge

Roshambo Shades has two product lines – prescription glasses and regular sunglasses – which require different workflows and turnaround times. Generally, non-prescription glasses are shipped out the next day, while prescription glasses take five business days to make. These workflows created the need for a quick and easy way to tag orders into different categories to generate and print shipping labels in bulk within each product line. 

Though Roshambo’s current business consists mainly of e-commerce sales, they have a wholesale presence as well. In order to support both their online and in-store sales, they needed to be able to ship with more than just one carrier. Additionally, because the business is based in the US (San Diego), but sources their glasses from a family-owned business in Italy, they needed to be able to support international shipping as well.

Their previous shipping process was very manual and tedious, which failed to support effective scaling of the business as they continued growing rapidly into the future. 

The Solution 

“One day we got 100 orders and were so excited, but it would’ve taken an hour to print all those labels without Shippo,” notes Julia Morris, Co-Founder and COO at Roshambo Shades. “Being our first attempt at entrepreneurship, let alone e-commerce, I was learning on the fly when this was a home business side hustle. I remember trying to use other platform shipping ‘solutions’ and finding them horribly cumbersome and expensive. Nothing was batched correctly according to our order types, reading order notes was not on the same page as the order rundown, and there was nobody to take our feedback or implement specific changes we needed,” states Scott Morris, Co-Founder and CEO at Roshambo Shades.

In 2016, Roshambos turned to Shippo to optimize their shipping process so they could focus on advertising and growing their audience, rather than having to worry about printing shipping labels. “That instantly made all the difference for our shipping efficiency. Finally we could easily tag orders into categories, read order notes right from the orders homepage, easily batch buy, choose carriers and rates, and bulk print labels in one easy step. At the time we were still a home based business, but the tools we put to use are equally effective now that we process hundreds of orders per week instead of dozens. I can’t imagine running our prescription fulfillment business without Shippo’s interface,” said Scott. 

The Results 

“Shippo is our one-stop-shop when it comes to shipping” - Julia Morris

With Shippo’s seamless integration with Shopify, Roshambo Shades uses the Shippo Web App for all their shipping needs. Through Shippo, Roshambo Shades is able to print labels in bulk, support shipping at a high volume amongst a variety of carriers both domestically and internationally, and provide the best discounted rates. 

“One more feather in the Shippo cap is the customer support. Whenever we have a technical issue or have a specific use case request, Shippo is super responsive and almost feels like they are willing to write new code just for us! One example is hiding prices on packing slips - for the longest time we did not have an option to hide prices for gifts and would have to manually print an alternate packing slip, burning valuable time in the process. After asking Shippo for the feature, like magic now we can hide prices with the click of a button.” - Scott Morris 

“Shipping is the biggest pain point for most online customers. In the Amazon world we live in, customers expect things to ship fast, be fully automated and trackable, yet still be free or close to free. Shippo helps us deliver that experience for our customers by keeping our rates as low as possible, increasing our efficiency exponentially (another cost saver), and automating everything we need in one user-friendly platform. It takes virtually no time to train new staff on the Shippo platform. I might be the least tech-savvy ecommerce entrepreneur in America; if I can use it, ANYONE can use it,” said Scott. 

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