Challenge: Craft Club launched in January 2021 as an online DTC brand focused on creating craft kits that are fun and accessible to everyone. As the brand grew they needed a logistics partner that could keep up with their global expansion and unlock cash flow that would further power their growth.
Solution: After starting with another direct fulfillment provider in China, Craft Club switched to Portless to help them cut down on lead times which reduced their cash conversion cycles, and enabled them to ship globally. The result has been a 300% growth of their business since partnering with Portless with no limiting factors on their ability to continue
Craft Club is an innovative e-commerce brand that has revolutionized the craft industry by making creativity accessible to everyone. Founded by husband-and-wife team Nikos Maniaty and Nakisah Williams, Craft Club specializes in high-quality craft kits designed for beginners and experienced crafters alike. What sets Craft Club apart is their commitment to ensuring that what customers see is exactly what they'll create – eliminating the frustration many crafters experience with traditional big-box retailer products.
The Craft Club story began in early 2021 when Nakisah, a naturally crafty person, found herself searching for new projects during the COVID lockdowns. Frustrated by the average designs available from existing retailers, she decided to create her own cross-stitch kits. With Nikos's marketing background supporting the launch through Facebook Ads, they started fulfilling orders from their spare bedroom. "She (Nakisah) is obviously the product mastermind behind it but I do a bit of everything else like marketing, finance, ops, logistics," Nikos explains. "She comes up with the amazing products and I move them."
Their goal is to become the largest craft company in the world and have expanded from a single cross-stitch category to multiple craft categories, selling globally and continuously launching new products that maintain their high standards of quality and accessibility.
Craft Club's rapid growth created a frustrating cycle that was limiting their potential. "We were scaling very, very rapidly. And when you're scaling rapidly, there's a cycle [that] starts occurring, whether you start scaling on Facebook or Instagram or Google and you effectively run out of stock," Nikos recalls. Craft Club’s traditional fulfillment model was creating significant cash flow constraints that prevented them from capitalizing on their growing marketing success.
The tipping point came when Craft Club found themselves repeatedly hitting revenue ceilings they couldn't break through. They were selling more scaling up production to match, but all of their sales were going to fund the next round of inventory production.
"It takes two or three weeks for a manufacturer to produce the product and then it takes another five weeks on a boat to get here [to the warehouse]. So effectively, you've got capital tied up on a boat doing nothing." - Nikos Maniaty
Adding to the complexity was managing inventory across multiple warehouses. "The added complexity of managing stock balances across three different warehouses is pretty exhausting and trying to balance that with stock launches, new kit launches, Black Friday, managing it across multiple warehouses is a pain." The team realized that reaching their goal of million-dollar months would take years under the traditional supply chain model, purely due to cash flow conversion cycle limitations. So, Nikos started to look into the direct fulfillment model to help solve Craft Club’s supply chain limitations.
When evaluating direct fulfillment partners, Craft Club prioritized operational reliability and systems sophistication. As Nikos explains, "Getting the operation side and fulfilling into new markets is the next big challenge because there's often so many moving parts. And if you're like Nakisah, she's a professional product person, I'm a professional marketer, but then neither of us have any kind of fulfillment experience. So you do have to find that trusted partner along the way."
“Fulfillment is really one of the three primary pillars of an e-commerce brand alongside product and growth. It's like 1) product, 2) growth, 3) fulfillment and you have to get those fundamental three right and I would argue that fulfillment can be sometimes one of the most challenging after you found that product-market fit ”- Nikos Maniaty
After choosing Portless as their logistics partner the transformation from a traditional supply chain model to Portless’s direct fulfillment model was immediate and dramatic. "Pretty much immediately, we saw a 3x in growth, corresponded to the 3x drop in our cash flow conversion cycle," says Nikos. This relationship between cash flow efficiency and growth potential proved the power of the direct fulfillment model for Nikos and Craft Club, and in turn enabled their team to push past the growth ceilings they were experiencing.
“It was one of those things where you knew it was going to be good, but you realise , okay, this is actually amazing.” - Nikos Maniaty
Inventory management became significantly more streamlined. "We used to be out of stock all the time. Now, we're never out of stock because the speed at which we can order, the speed at which we can sell, the speed at which we can scale, it's all just so much greater." The ability to replenish inventory within days rather than weeks eliminated the revenue ceiling constraints that had previously limited their growth.
The operational improvements from Portless’s direct fulfillment also unlocked new strategic capabilities for Craft Club, particularly in international market expansion. "Another transformative thing is the ability to scale into any market straight away. If I want to experiment with Japan, I just create a campaign on Meta and we're off. "
This agility has also enabled the Craft Club team to rapidly market-test their products. "We could quickly get some sales and understand what the CAC (cost to acquire) was, what return on ad spend was, what the cut through in the market was. You could just get in and start testing and experimenting really quickly in certain markets without too much of a cost burden."
“Not everything is going to be a winner, but you can learn something from that experiment, come back to it and apply it to other markets. That ability with Portless is fantastic ” - Nikos Maniaty
And while the ability to unlock new markets has opened new opportunities for Craft Club, shipping times have not been compromised thanks to the speed of the Portless network. "We are averaging seven days [order-to-delivery] now, which is absolutely crazy that from a central point on the planet, we can get to pretty much any other point within seven days." says Nikos.
Craft Club's growth strategy centers on accelerated product launches enabled by their new fulfillment model. "Obviously the cornerstone of our growth is product launches. So we've got some amazing new launches coming down the pipeline, new categories, new markets.” The direct fulfillment lead time advantage has in-turn transformed their product development cycle: "The ability to just spin up a new product with our manufacturer and get it into Portless quickly or so much faster than before makes that launch sequence far more exciting."
For Ecommerce professionals facing similar scaling challenges, Nikos emphasizes the transformative potential of addressing cash flow conversion cycles head-on. The direct fulfillment model solved multiple problems simultaneously: inventory management complexity, cash flow constraints, shipping speed concerns, and international expansion barriers.
The key is recognizing that fulfillment is one of the three fundamental pillars of e-commerce success, alongside product and growth. When traditional fulfillment models create artificial constraints on scaling, exploring direct fulfillment with Portless can unlock exponential growth potential.
“Shifting a lot of your fulfillment to China is no small thing. And since then, it's been an amazing growth curve. I think it's one of the most profound decisions we've made, and it's certainly been absolutely massive in terms of how it's transformed our cash flow and how it's transformed our scaling. So again, I would say that moving to Portless as part of that journey has been kind of really where we've started to see that kind of hockey stick growth curve.” - Nikos Maniaty
The results for Craft Club speak for themselves: 3x growth, dramatically improved cash flow, enhanced shipping performance with a local/domestic experience for the end-customer, and the operational agility to expand into new markets with minimal risk. For brands experiencing similar revenue ceiling constraints, the direct fulfillment model represents a strategic solution that can fundamentally transform business trajectory.
