Truly Sweet Candy: A kitchen-table hobby becomes a paperless, multi-channel warehouse with StoreFeeder.
Truly Sweet Candy sells sweet jar kits on eBay, Amazon, and its own website, with many orders from couples planning their weddings. Tracy started the business 11 years ago as a hobby in her back kitchen. From humble beginnings, it's grown into a warehouse with its own staff, run day to day by Tracy and her husband, and when it moved to StoreFeeder around three years ago, they still processed every order by hand.
We spoke with Tracy Lock, the founder, about getting a manual operation under control, how paperless picking changed life on their warehouse floor, and why getting her Sunday mornings back mattered more than any saving.
Before StoreFeeder, everything was manual. Orders from each marketplace were printed out, postage was processed by hand, and labels were then matched to packing slips. Labels regularly ended up with the wrong slip, so buyers received the wrong parcel.
The product range made packing harder still. Buyers build their own kit, choosing several sweet jars, then tongs, scoops and bags in 26 colours. Some orders carry 16 different components, and packers had no way of knowing what belonged in each box, so Tracy's husband wrote a checklist for every kit by hand.
On top of that, the business faced several other problems:
"The potential for a picking and packing error was absolutely huge. Before StoreFeeder, we were in a pretty bad way." – Tracy, Truly Sweet Candy
Truly Sweet Candy now runs a paperless warehouse. Pickers work from PDAs, and packers use mobile printers, so the handwritten checklists have gone. The PDA tells each picker exactly what to pick for every kit, down to the colour and pattern of the bags, and barcode scanning stops them if they reach for the wrong item.
"If they chose the pink stripe rather than the pink polka dot, their machine would vibrate, and it wouldn't let them go any further." – Tracy, Truly Sweet Candy
Orders from every channel are despatched through one workflow with several carriers connected, and postage rules choose the right service for each product. Tracy assumed the rules would be beyond her, but they were straightforward to set up.
Onboarding took more work than most, because Truly Sweet Candy's products had never followed consistent SKUs and had to be mapped first. A member of StoreFeeder's onboarding team broke the project into weekly tasks, and the business went live at a pace Tracy could manage alongside running it.
Picking accuracy has gone from what Tracy calls "pretty dire" to 99.99%. Pickers and packers now work on their own, so the warehouse manager is no longer fielding hundreds of questions a day about what goes in which box, and production has gone up.
The team tracks its average cost to pack an order every week, dividing picker and packer wages by the number of orders.
"Our average cost to pack an order is less now than it was three years ago, before we implemented StoreFeeder. That's despite wages increasing by 44.86% over the same period. That could not have been done without StoreFeeder." – Tracy, Truly Sweet Candy
Training has changed just as much, which matters when summer peak brings in school leavers and students.
"The new staff member came in; we showed them the pick run and gave them a PDA. Within an hour they were picking and packing." – Tracy, Truly Sweet Candy
The change Tracy values most is the one that affects her personally. With weekend orders now processed automatically, she and her husband no longer spend Sunday mornings in the warehouse.
"If we take aside all of the savings the business has made, giving me and my husband our Sunday morning back trumps everything." – Tracy, Truly Sweet Candy
A ten-second production report shows how many orders each person picked in a day or a week. When someone falls below average, Tracy checks whether the warehouse layout is the cause and rearranges the pick run.
Sales data over any period now also drives purchasing. Knowing how much of a line sells in a month stops Tracy from ordering 2,000 of something that will still be on the shelf next Christmas, which keeps both warehouse space and cash free.
The same records have also changed how courier negotiations are done. Knowing exactly what it sends by parcel size, per day, week or month, Truly Sweet Candy can negotiate on its own figures and approach new carriers. One kit box that cost around £3.70 plus VAT to send now goes for £2.99, on a parcel the business sends every week. After a run of item-not-received claims on untracked large letters, the team also moved them to a tracked service and has had no further claims.
The pick records also protect the margin after despatch. When a buyer claims tongs or scoops were missing from a kit, Tracy can send the pickwave log, showing every item scanned into the box, alongside the parcel's recorded weight. Replacing everything to keep a customer happy is no longer the only option.
"It gives you confidence in your staff and a way of going back to people without being accusatory. We know the items were in the box when it left our warehouse." – Tracy, Truly Sweet Candy
Tracy chose StoreFeeder on the strength of its Trustpilot and Google reviews, which kept coming back to the support and onboarding teams. Three years on, support tickets are answered within an hour and usually in under 15 minutes, with regular check-ins to make sure she's getting the most from the system. When Truly Sweet Candy booked its first eBay Live show, one support message confirmed StoreFeeder was already set up for it.
"If you're a small business that feels like it's all got a bit out of hand, and you're debating a warehouse management system, just do it. I don't think we would have survived without StoreFeeder." – Tracy, Truly Sweet Candy
"Our average cost to pack an order is less now than it was three years ago. That could not have been done without StoreFeeder."
Tracy, Truly Sweet Candy
