How Nustrips replaced Spreadsheets and Slack Chaos with a System that Scales
Industry: Health & Wellness
Business: Nustrips
About: Nustrips is a fast-growing supplement brand expanding into retail, selling through Faire, RepRally, AirGoods and direct relationships with boutique retailers and hospitality groups.
Company Size: 2–10 employees
The Challenge: When Growth Meets Chaos
Nustrips was excited: after strong early traction online, they were entering more retail and hospitality channels. But growth came with a cost: every wholesale order meant a series of repetitive, manual tasks across Google Sheets, QuickBooks, Slack and a variety of marketplaces and vendor portals:
The operations flow looked something like this:
Each PO had to be entered into a Google Sheets PO tracker: line items, customer, shipping address, key dates, and special instructions
Invoice had to be generated via Quickbooks
The order was communicated to the 3PL via Slack, along with shipping instructions, quantities, invoices and packaging notes
Handled by a single ops coordinator, this process quickly hit its limit as the number of POs processed weekly crept up. And with no centralized tracking, errors crept in and issues often weren’t caught until it was too late.
“ Adding more headcount didn’t fix the problem. We needed the system to do the work.” - Viraj Mohan, Founder of NuStrips
Initially, Nustrips onboarded with Shopify Plus, but found it clunky, expensive and inflexible. It could not handle retail complexity.
“Shopify Plus couldn’t do what we actually needed.” - Viraj Mohan, Founder of NuStrips
The Turning Point
Nustrips needed a way to move from manual coordination to system‑driven coordination. They wanted a system that could:
Track and centralize every PO
Generate Quickbooks invoice
Push updates to Slack automatically
Automate 3PL communication
Nustrips wanted to run the system, not do the grunt work.
The Solution: Buddy’s Flexible Platform
Buddy partnered with Nustrips to eliminate the mess behind each wholesale order. Here’s what changed:
Automate and track every PO - auto-ingest from email and marketplaces, auto-generate Quickbooks invoice, show real-time status, store key order fields
On-demand Slack Alert - new order visibility and alert, approval workflow, track communication back to a single PO
Standardize 3PL handoffs - generate and send fulfillment-ready messages without human formatting
The Results: Faster Fulfillment, Fewer Mistakes, 5% Margin Saved
Buddy helped Nustrips shift from manual entry and scattered tools to a centralized, review-based workflow, cutting down processing time, reducing fulfillment mistakes and keeping their team lean even as order volume grew.
Metric | Before Buddy | After Buddy |
|---|---|---|
PO Processing Time | 10–20 min per order | Reduced to 1-2 minutes review time |
Fulfillment Errors | A constant worry; occasional manual mistakes | Confident, with approval steps for quick fixes |
Time Spent Communicating with 3PL | ~15+ hours/week | 60-70% automated |
Decision Making Speed | N/A | Insight into their sales orders |
We don’t type orders anymore - we review and approve them. That one change gave us alot more comfort and cut hours of work to give us room to grow.” - Ren, Ops Specialist of NuStrips
