Ritual Case Study

Business Growth by Ritual

Ritual, the traceable health and wellness brand working to raise the standard in the supplement industry, aimed to accelerate growth by establishing new retail relationships with major chains like Target and Whole Foods Market.

Ritual knew essential EDI capabilities would be key to implementing successful launches with these retailers, and would help expedite partner integration, give visibility into EDI transaction flows, assist with vendor troubleshooting and create a seamless data exchange across systems.

To propel retail expansions vital to Ritual's business, identifying an industry-leading EDI vendor offered a clear solution.

Solution

Ritual implemented Orderful’s intuitive, developer-friendly EDI platform to gain control, visibility, and speed for retail supply chain connectivity. This unlocked the ability to rapidly onboard and manage trading partners. Compliance with the latest EDI standards was ensured, as Orderful focused on EDI document standards and flows.

Orderful's Specialized EDI Expertise and Managed Services

The company focuses on truly empowering emerging brands across verticals to achieve frictionless EDI integration through:

• Developer-centric EDI software designed for user control with retail protocols embedded
• Hands-on EDI implementation guidance starting day one
• Proactive EDI service monitoring and automated issue resolution
• Continuous EDI integration refinement as customers scale
• Business process mappings to optimize workflows over time
• Compliance tracking and road mapping for future EDI implementation changes

What sets Orderful apart is its customer-centric approach spanning EDI software and managed services. Rather than passively enabling baseline transactions, Orderful specialists monitor real-time workflows, provide actionable recommendations, to help troubleshoot problems before they negatively impact operations.

Why Orderful Was the Clear Choice to Power Ritual's Retail Expansion

Ritual thoroughly evaluated multiple full-service solutions and determined core criteria for an optimal platform fit.

Ritual wanted an EDI provider to give them control, flexibility, and attentive customer service as a first-time EDI implementor. The platform needed to have tools that Ritual's developers could use to easily customize integrations. It also needed to provide transparency so Ritual's teams could manage configurations themselves.

This aligns with Ritual's own modern, developer-focused approach, as Daniel Archer discussed: “Ritual and our software development team really take an unconventional approach to delivering quality experiences to our customers, whomever they may be, and our retailer relationships are no different. Our in-house development is focused on creating and building that trust with our customers by adopting modern tools and technologies.”

Ritual worked within extremely tight deadlines, requiring a provider with top-notch customer service to ensure rapid setup. As the team evaluated platforms, three criteria stood out as most critical:

1. Developer control and visibility - The platform had to enable custom integrations and internal transparency into EDI workflows.
2. Internal self-service management - Internal teams needed to be able to configure and operate workflows themselves 
3. Responsive support - Exceptional assistance was essential to expedite the tight implementation timeline.

After assessing vendors against these pillars, Orderful emerged as a strong choice. Their modern architecture offered the development-friendly APIs Ritual's engineers required. Visibility and an intuitive interface empowered internal self-service management rather than ambiguity, and Orderful's responsive guidance ensured Ritual met aggressive go-live targets. The platform's strengths directly addressed Ritual's EDI needs.

Specifically, Orderful’s cloud-native API approach, real-time visibility tools, and customer-centric model aligned perfectly with Ritual’s requirements for launching retail partnerships on an aggressive six-week timeline. Further due diligence reinforced key advantages unique to Orderful, including:

• Developer-first APIs with serialized JSON data formats
• Granular dashboards across every transaction
• Embedded rules engine to modify mappings and business logic
• Predictable pricing models vs variable transaction fees
• Collaborative support focused on customer success
• Expertise in EDI standards and best practices

For Ritual, Orderful satisfied must-have capabilities while providing reassurance that the team could stay in control of current and future trading relationships. Orderful offered welcome transparency. Ultimately, by selecting Orderful, Ritual put itself in the driver's seat to manage the critical processes underpinning its strategic retail distribution growth plans.

"It was critical to us to have an EDI provider that had a high availability and understood EDI documents with the trading partners we were working with and hoping to pursue."

Rapid Retail EDI Lift-Off: How Orderful Facilitated Ritual's Timeline

Upon selecting Orderful as their EDI partner, Ritual rapidly rolled out trading partner integrations. Using Orderful’s out-of-the-box templates as a baseline, the Ritual team configured solution requirements for the first round of retailers. Over the course of about six weeks, Ritual leaned heavily on Orderful’s seasoned professional services team to walk through necessary customizations and standard EDI best practice recommendations based on extensive experience supporting live implementations. By maintaining open communication and collaborating on configurations, Orderful helped Ritual meet tight deadlines for partner certification.

Throughout the acceleration program, Ritual also integrated Orderful natively with its surrounding systems, including NetSuite (via Workato) and their third-party logistics (3PL) partner. Combining Orderful’s cloud platform and complementary tools like Workato unlocked agile connectivity between core business solutions to power accurate, timely data interchange.

Throughout implementation, Orderful's modern approach delivered quantifiable advantages, including:

• 50% faster rollout vs. alternate platforms
• Fully operational in under two months
• Rapid issue resolution empowering self-sufficiency
• Intuitive control over transactional workflows

In just six short weeks, Ritual had established the technological and process foundation necessary to conduct robust EDI transactions with some of the largest retailers in the industry. By implementing Orderful’s industry-leading EDI software solution, Ritual gained the control, visibility, and speed imperative for supply chain resiliency.

Transformational Impacts and Benefits

Once live on Orderful’s platform, Ritual immediately observed tangible positive outcomes from its accelerated digital supply chain transformation. Beyond core EDI services enabling partner connectivity, Orderful delivered differentiation across critical aspects, including accuracy, responsiveness, and ownership. Specifically, trading partners applauded Ritual’s out-of-the-gate success in receiving and processing purchase orders within the required time frames at scale. The intuitive workflows also aided fast, independent troubleshooting when inevitable issues surfaced. Together, these capabilities earned trust and reinforced reliability.

Additional transformational impacts unlocked by Orderful included:

• Exceeded demanding partner SLAs for immediacy and accuracy
• Greater business agility reacting dynamically to order changes
• Workflows and documents were optimized
• Rapid assimilation of new trading relationships
• Earned credibility via disciplined EDI discipline
• Improved supply chain business processes through EDI automation

By taking absolute control of a mission-critical process once seen as an opaque blocker, Ritual’s internal teams gained improved visibility into sales velocities while strengthening interdepartmental alignments.

With an established integration framework and EDI competency in place thanks to Orderful, Ritual could expand relationships faster knowing that core infrastructure could scale securely to meet volume demands. The partnership with Orderful fortified Ritual with the tools needed to facilitate frictionless transactions across a growing, decentralized network of partners.

Building on Success

With essential EDI foundations now established, Ritual can look for ways to extend Orderful's capabilities to streamline additional processes.

Looking ahead, Ritual sees further opportunities to leverage Orderful's platform capabilities and partnership:

• Expanding Integration: Leveraging Orderful's EDI tool and APIs to integrate EDI data and workflows across more of Ritual's surrounding systems like logistics, CRM, and business planning using Workato’s pre-built connectors
• Leveraging Advanced Functionality: Tapping into more of Orderful's sophisticated built-in features, such as the rules engine, to drive further automation and efficiency. The rules engine has already helped streamline required format changes.
• Supporting Growth: Continuing to work closely with Orderful as Ritual expands into new EDI document workflows and builds relationships with additional retailers requiring tailored EDI and supply chain integration. Orderful's repository of existing trading partner guidelines accelerates onboarding.

Ritual values Orderful as a collaborative technology partner willing to co-innovate. Together, they can create customized digital supply chain capabilities to meet Ritual's needs as the business scales.

The Partnership Powering New Possibilities

As Ritual rapidly expanded from a direct-to-consumer company into an omnichannel brand , implementing resilient EDI integration connectivity was critical. Orderful provided the technology and customer-centric approach necessary to support frictionless omnichannel growth.

Together, Orderful’s developer-friendly EDI platform and Ritual’s ambitious innovation mindset combined to drive differentiated partner experiences exceeding expectations for accuracy, timeliness, and issue resolution. By taking complete ownership of mission-critical workflows, Ritual gained supply chain agility, accelerating new product introductions and trading relationship expansion.

With a solid EDI system foundation now in place thanks to Orderful, Ritual is poised to continue pioneering the future of resilient distributed commerce at scale.

As supply chain visibility and agility take center stage for retailers and brands alike, Ritual and Orderful stand ready to conquer the next frontier of challenges through continued collaboration.

About Ritual 

Ritual is a health and wellness brand aiming to bring a new level of transparency to the health and wellness industry. A Certified B Corporation, they have pioneered a new standard of high-quality multivitamins and supplements backed by science and made tangible with the first visible supply chain of its kind. Together with leading scientists, researchers, and advisors, Ritual has developed products based on thousands of independent research studies. It now has one of the leading prenatal multivitamins in the U.S. Ritual is available on Amazon.com, with the Climate Friendly Pledge Badge nationwide at Whole Foods Market and Target. Ritual sells supplements using web EDI with major retailers. Learn more at Ritual.com.