Juniper Row ships missing hardware while its team sleeps

Juniper Row sells bed frames, nightstands and dressers from a studio in Savannah and ships them flat-packed across the Southeast. Its four-person support team works Eastern business hours. Its customers assemble furniture at night.

The 11 PM message

Malik Desrosiers, who leads support, pulled the numbers in the spring: 22% of all messages arrived between 8 PM and midnight, and almost a third of those were about hardware. A bolt missing from the bag, a cam lock that stripped, a slat support that cracked during assembly.

“Every one of those meant someone sleeping on a mattress on the floor,” Malik says. “And we would not see it until nine the next morning.”

Writing the rule down

The team had always handled parts requests by feel. Before turning on Porchlight, Malik wrote one rule: any hardware from the bag that came with the order, for orders under 90 days old, up to $40, once per order. Anything else goes to a person.

Porchlight loads the hardware list for every Juniper Row product from the order system, with the letters printed on the assembly sheet. When a customer says something is missing, it shows them the parts for their exact frame and asks them to pick one.

What it caught

Since June, Porchlight has sent 312 parts orders without a person, a median of 58 seconds after the first message. The daily summary also counts repeats, and in July it showed the same 80 mm bolt missing from five orders of the same frame in a week. The warehouse found a mislabeled bin. It happened again in August with a different part.

I thought it would save us time. I did not expect it to fix the warehouse.

Juniper Row is on the Porch plan with its storefront and one carrier connected.