Kiwi Artisan started when founder Dave Thorne couldn’t find any specialty olives at his local farmer’s market.
Fast-forward and Kiwi Artisan now supplies a full range of specialty olives, nuts, oils, and spices into major retailers across New Zealand and Australia – including Woolworths, IGA, Foodstuffs, plus hundreds of independent grocers.
Sierra Brock built their wholesale channel from the ground up, starting with their very first stockist and growing it to many hundreds of accounts. She described what it was like in the early days.
“It was very manual. A lot of Excel sheets, phone calls, emails, portals. Dealing with Woolworths, Foodstuffs, all the independents. Everyone has a different format for processing orders.
Once we discovered Upstock we immediately automated the entire ordering process. It completely changed everything.”
Doing it manually meant every new customer added more admin time, complexity and cost. Every retailer had a different format for placing orders. And the major supermarkets all have clunky portals – each with their own complex rules, formats, and navigation.
For Sierra, who was the sole person managing sales and operations, it was becoming impossible to scale.
“Without Upstock, it would probably be 50 times the amount of work. On the ordering front alone, it used to take five or six hours a day.
Adding customers used to slow us down. Now with Upstock we're growing faster than ever. One person can easily handle it all. If we didn’t have Upstock, we’d need a whole team doing orders, it would be a mess, and they’d struggle to keep up.”
Upstock Pay has transformed how they handle both wholesale payments and onboarding new customers. It has completely removed the hassles of credit checks and the risks of chasing bad debt.
“We’ve had customers with serious late payment issues. Now as soon as an order is approved, it's charged. For new customers, instead of running a credit check, we put them on Upstock Pay. It's transformed how we manage cashflow.”
Only a select few people are allowed access to their accounting and inventory systems – which are complex to use and hold very sensitive commercial data.
The business urgently needed a platform anyone could use without needing special expertise or special training, without giving everyone access to all their financial systems.
“Upstock is the hub that speaks to Xero, speaks to Unleashed, speaks directly to our customers.
“We don’t input the orders anymore, they’re entered by our customers directly into Upstock. Customers see the order was placed, see it was approved, see it was shipped, see all the tracking details. Customers love it too, because it’s so much easier for everyone.
"Before, it was all on me, which was stressful and slowed things down. Now, if I'm out, someone else can easily cover.”
Their wholesale buyers now have the full Kiwi Artisan catalogue available 24/7, it’s always up-to-date showing what’s in stock and all the latest product launches – plus, every customer sees their specific negotiated wholesale prices.
In the past, buyers were working off static wholesale sheets sent by email – sheets that got lost, went out of date, and never showed what was new. Now, buyers discover new products mid-order and add them on the spot.
This has led to increased order sizes, order frequency, and expansion across the range.
“We've noticed each week they're adding two or three new SKUs, or they see a new product release and they want the whole range in store. Time and time again, I've seen customers very quickly expand how much Kiwi Artisan they stock.”
Nearly all their wholesale customers are now using Upstock. With the rare handful of customers who haven't made the switch yet, Upstock still automatically handles their orders too.
“About 90% of our customers order directly through Upstock. But really I'd say 99% of all orders flow through the app. For anyone still sending emails, we just forward it to Upstock and the AI matches the products and pricing automatically.”
The supermarket EDI integrations with Woolworths and Foodstuffs alone saved Sierra more than 10 hours a week across ordering, communications, and invoicing – and cut order errors almost entirely.
“It saves us not forgetting shipping, not missing a SKU, not having the wrong pricing. Upstock will flag a warning if something isn't matching properly. It even picks up pricing inconsistencies across our entire Foodstuffs account that we would have been leaking money on for months without ever knowing.”
Before Upstock, winning new wholesale accounts meant driving across the entire country literally door knocking, cold calling, trying to catch the right buyer at the right moment. It was slow, exhausting, expensive, and produced mixed results.
Now, Kiwi Artisan typically receives one new customer invite per day through Upstock. Stores they never visited, in towns they didn’t even know existed, are finding them on the platform and asking to trade.
“Upstock would account for around 80% of our inbound wholesale leads. Almost every day we have a new customer wanting to invite us to trade. It's incredibly helpful for the sales team, not just for processing orders, but for finding new customers.”
Sierra is clear that Upstock doesn't replace the sales work, but it removes the friction that was getting in the way of reaching and expanding prospects.
“Upstock is a tool to help you generate orders and new leads, but you still need to nurture the relationships. It takes away the monotony – the admin, the data entry, the debt chasing – so now we can put all our energy into growth.”
The first time Sierra used Upstock she discovered that a large portion of the independent retailers she'd been emailing manually for months were already on the platform – stores sitting there, ready to order, with sales that should have happened much sooner.
“Our biggest regret is not getting on Upstock earlier. That first day, I immediately thought we should have joined a year ago. If we started earlier, it would have helped formulate our entire strategy – put the right focus in the right places, our customers would have been better connected to everything we were doing, and it would have made scaling so much smoother from the start.”
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