overview
With 32 corporate sites worldwide, energy company Valero needed thousands of promotional pieces for its annual United Way charity campaign. United Way mobilizes funding for charities across 37 countries that support education, health, and economic mobility. Valero has partnered with United Way since their founding 39 years ago, contributing more than $255 million.
The United Way campaign was a pretty monumental task, though, considering the fact that each site chose a different shirt color in different quantities and sizes. One site might need 600 blue T-shirts while another needed 500 green T-shirts.
To complicate matters, Valero HQ had just one employee managing all of these orders in a huge spreadsheet. Each site also held their United Way campaigns at slightly different times, with some happening in August and others in October. The logistics of placing individual site orders was overwhelming, expensive, and time-consuming. Eager for efficiency, Valero tapped Boundless Brand Consultants Jennifer Mora and Brandee Scott to streamline the promotional product ordering process.
strategy & goals
Boundless soon realized how much time and energy Valero’s hardworking team spent manually managing United Way promo. The team encouraged Valero to embrace GroupBuy™, Boundless’s proprietary software that allows multiple locations to leverage economies of scale while simplifying the ordering process.
Valero was skeptical at first. It felt intimidating to enter all the sites' orders at once. But it needed to see efficiencies, so Valero used GroupBuy™ for one United Way season to see how it performed. Plus, Boundless includes GroupBuy™ for all clients, so the new approach only had upsides.
Boundless sent an ordering link to each site that allowed them to place their own orders—with no intervention from the HQ employee. Instead of placing seven separate T-shirt orders, Valero could now place one large order for 10,000 T-shirts simultaneously. From there, GroupBuy™ split up the order, dropshipped it to the different sites, and generated correct invoices for each site.
results
Valero was thrilled with Boundless GroupBuy’s™ results. Its teams leveraged economies of scale by ordering in larger quantities. In fact, Valero estimates it saved around $8,000 with GroupBuy™ in this single United Way campaign.
GroupBuy™ also helped Valero to take a less reactive approach to T-shirt orders. With the new tool, each site could place orders earlier and forecast their needs—something they had never done before.
The Valero HQ employee was particularly appreciative of the change. She used to keep huge spreadsheets and spent hours managing everything manually. She couldn’t believe how easy GroupBuy™ made the process.
conclusion
All sites were happy with the new T-shirt ordering approach. All orders came through correctly, and everyone got exactly what they needed.
In fact, after seeing the cost and time savings, Valero ran more GroupBuy™ campaigns with Boundless. It tapped Boundless for its Valero Renewables campaigns, which place quarterly GroupBuy™ orders. As the world’s second-largest producer of corn ethanol, Valero Renewables also wanted to host engagement events. This separate division of Valero has its own logo, as well as 11 separate sites, making it a perfect candidate for GroupBuy™.
Today, Valero’s team takes a proactive approach to leverage cost savings and save more time. Boundless is currently working with the Valero corporate team to ditch spot buying completely and get on a regular ordering cadence with GroupBuy™ orders, making the company even more efficient.
