How Coterie saves at least $150k a year and scales without adding headcount

The reality of scaling a bulky product

For Coterie, running a successful operation requires orchestrating multiple complex elements while maintaining perfect reliability for subscribers. 

Managing everything from strategic sourcing to customer experience—with shipping costs being a crucial factor—means every aspect of their operation needs to work in harmony.

So much of our cost is centered around moving our product,” Zachs explains.

“Diapers are big and bulky, and it’s costly to both freight it into our warehouses and ship it outbound to our customers…shipping costs dictate our supply chain network. The most obvious way to expand our gross margin is almost always either freight or parcel.”

As VP of Ops, Zachs leads a remote-first team handling strategic sourcing, vendor management, planning, inventory, transportation, fulfillment, customer shipping, and customer experience. Each of these areas requires constant data analysis and optimization to maintain efficiency.

“We run a very lean team at Coterie,” Zachs notes. “And in the past two years more than 60% of my team, including myself, have taken parental leave. Working for a baby care company comes with really generous and lovely parental leave, but it also means that at a given time, we are doing multiple jobs at once.”

Despite her extensive background in consulting and startups, even Zachs was initially skeptical about moving away from traditional tools: “I’ve spent my entire career in Excel and Google sheets, and even when you have full-fledged ERP systems or fancy BI tools, the reality is, there’s just so much that Excel and only Excel and Google sheets can do.”

Turning complexity into control

Parcel optimization

Their primary parcel automation Flow handles all the fundamentals—auditing base rates, fuel surcharges, dimensional weights, and packaging accuracy—but Coterie has taken it “10 steps further.” 

The Flow now provides order-level contribution margin analysis by combining parcel data with NetSuite order information. This enables the team to inform their go-to-market strategy by identifying which bundles deliver higher contribution margins. It also quickly pinpoints warehouse inefficiencies in order packing and box sizes, leading to meaningful  cost savings. In one instance, they discovered their warehouse wasn’t effectively consolidating multi-case orders, an insight that saved them at least $12,000 per month.

Freight cost analysis

The team built sophisticated Flows to track and optimize freight costs, both domestic and international. By ingesting carrier invoice data through standardized Excel templates, they've created comprehensive views for budgeting, re-forecasting, and carrier negotiations. 

“Having a really solid understanding of your freight costs and all the individual components beneath that is super critical,” Zachs explains. “You need to have them at your fingertips where before they were buried in invoices, or we would just have to manually track them.” This visibility enabled them to secure fixed rates with freight forwarders and optimize their split between fixed rate and market rate volume.

Final mile delivery optimization

It’s clear that consistent delivery is non-negotiable for a subscription-based diaper company. Coterie’s final mile optimization Flow integrates P44 tracking data to analyze carrier performance at the zip code level, enabling precise cost versus lead time analysis. This granular insight helps them optimize carrier selection between OnTrac, UPS, and FedEx. When they identify performance issues in specific zip codes, they can quickly adjust routing to maintain service levels while controlling costs.

Try parcel spend forecasting in Parabola

The transformation in how the team interacts with data has been dramatic. As Zachs puts it: “You go from manually updating the data to just looking at it…isn’t that a beautiful thing? When I just look at the outputs and it's already clean and done for me.”

Doing more with less

The impact of these automations has been transformative. In the past two years, Coterie has seen significant growth without a corresponding increase in operations headcount. 

“My team hasn’t grown over the last couple of years, and we’re always down someone at any given time. So not only do we not need to hire, but we're pretty much always in a deficit,” Zachs explains. Despite this lean approach, the team has maintained exceptional operational efficiency. 

With Parabola, they: 

• Identified $12k/month in savings by detecting inefficient multi-case order consolidation at warehouses 
• Helped the business scale >40% YoY without increasing headcount on the supply chain team
• Automated 10–30% of each teammate’s role so they can focus on higher-value work
• Enabled better freight cost management, supporting fixed rate negotiations and partner QBRs
• Optimized parcel carrier selection down to a zip code–level

When asked what would happen if Parabola disappeared tomorrow, Zachs’ response is immediate: “There would be a moment where I’d be a little bit paralyzed…my whole team would cry, because we’d have to go back to not only an analog version, but an inferior version.”

Perhaps most importantly, the automation has sparked a cultural transformation in how the team approaches problems.

Once you do a couple of steps, you just get it, and then you’re off to the races, and then it just becomes insanely addictive. And it also just changes your mindset of what is possible,” Zachs reflects.

The automation has given her team unprecedented visibility and control over their operations. “When you do analysis in Excel, you know that you’re just scraping the surface, and usually it's good enough. But you know you're leaving money on the table because you’re not able to look at the data deep enough to find non-obvious opportunities.”

For a company that needs to be there for parents at 2 AM, having this level of operational efficiency isn’t just about margins—it’s about delivering on a promise. Through automation, Coterie has built a well-oiled operation that ensures they’ll always be there when parents need them most, proving that with the right tools, you can scale operations without scaling headcount.

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This customer story is for informational purposes only. Parabola makes no warranties, express or implied, in this document.