keting opportunities—and that’s where
we’ll make our profits,” says Slayton. “Our
manufacturers can do direct email cam-
paigns where everything is very targeted,
from couponing and sampling to product
reviews.” While emphasizing that no per-
sonal information on consumers is ever
shared, Slayton says that Alice.com has a
lot of information on the consumer in
terms of their buying behavior and pat-
terns. “If a manufacturer wants to target
only customers that are using a particular
product, for example, we can enable a tar-
geted coupon offer just to those con-
sumers,” he says. “This model was not
designed with the goal of making money
on the fulfillment side of the business.”
Fulfillment is crucial to Alice.com’s suc-
cess, however, and when the startup went
looking for a logistics partner it teamed up
with OHL, a third-party logistics provider
based in Nashville. “We wanted to find a
logistics partner that could bring a lot of
experience to the table with regards to a
pick/pack/ship operation for e-commerce,”
says Slayton. “OHL had a lot of direct-to-
consumer experience already, so they
SPOTLIGHT ON NVISION
‘Prior to NVISION, we managed everything internally.
Our marketing supply chain was complex, fragmented and
had over 64 suppliers. With NVISION, we were able to reduce
costs by over 20 percent, and improve speed to market,
quality of our printed and branded materials, time-savings
among our our brand reps, get better forecasting,
a reduction in back-ordered materials and establish
a complete and comprehensive warehousing
and inventory management system.’
