Every brand that crosses eight figures hits the same question, usually in a meeting about something else: this process is eating someone's week, so do we eliminate it, automate it, or hire for it? Big Moods put that question to us directly. Now it's the operating principle for how they run the whole back office. When a new process starts consuming the team, they don't open a job req. They send it to Agentway.

A big brand with a small team, on purpose

Big Moods is one of the best sticker brands in the country. They sell several million dollars a year direct to consumer on Shopify, they're a top seller in their category on Faire with thousands of independent retail accounts, and their products sit on shelves at Cracker Barrel, Target, Bass Pro Shops, and a growing list of national chains. They've expanded from stickers into greeting cards, candles, and new product lines, and the wholesale side of the business keeps compounding.

What they have deliberately not done is build the org chart that usually comes with that footprint. There is no wholesale operations department. There is a small team that wants to spend its time on product and growth, and a standing decision to buy operational capacity from us instead of hiring it.

Eliminate, automate, or hire

The relationship started in customer support in the fall of 2025. Agentway took over the ticket queue, with full order history and tracking context behind every response and a human review loop where it mattered. Support is also where we earned the access and the trust for everything that followed, because running someone's inbox means being plugged into their Shopify data, their fulfillment partner, and their customers' actual problems.

The bigger opportunity surfaced in a February operations meeting. Wholesale purchase orders had become the most painful manual process in the company. A single Cracker Barrel order isn't one purchase order. It's 134 of them, one per store, each needing its own spreadsheet line, its own shipping label, its own packing slip, and its own retailer-specific compliance rules, where a formatting mistake means a chargeback. Someone on the team was spending entire days inside SPS Commerce, Google Sheets, and ShipStation doing transcription work that a national retail business simply generates as exhaust.

"We framed it exactly that way: can this be eliminated, can it be automated, or do we need to hire someone? Agentway's answer was to come watch us do it, then do it for us."

Joey Rexford, Co-founder, Big Moods

Prove it on one task first

We didn't start by proposing a platform. We started by replicating Big Moods' existing Cracker Barrel process exactly: same spreadsheet format, same review steps, same email handoff to their fulfillment partner. The first full batch of 134 POs ran with their team checking every output against what a human would have produced.

That review caught what reviews are for, and this is the part we're proudest of. Our system flagged that one Iowa store's requested quantity didn't match their usual order. It caught ShipStation's address validation quietly rewriting street addresses, a chargeback risk nobody had priced in. The errors it surfaced were in the existing systems and the existing process, and finding them is how an automation earns the right to run on its own.

Nothing about this runs in a black box. Every batch produces a folder of artifacts Big Moods can open: the original PO PDFs, the generated labels and packing slips, a step-by-step log of what was done, and an independent AI audit pass over the results. The team approved the first batches by hand. Then the checkpoints they no longer needed fell away, and by May, hundred-PO batches were running clean with zero failures and zero manual interventions. One week that spring, a single retailer's volume represented nearly three thousand copy-and-paste steps that no person performed, and that's one retailer of many, every week, indefinitely.

Every retailer speaks its own dialect

What makes wholesale hard isn't volume. It's that every retailer enforces different rules. Target wants acknowledgements and ASNs on a schedule. Bass Pro requires acknowledgement before ASN, case-pack math, inner-pack labels, and a separate customs process for Canadian orders, down to the broker details. Boutique chains want warehouse and direct-to-store splits handled differently. Faire isn't EDI at all.

So we built Big Moods a workflow per retailer, each one encoding the compliance rules that retailer actually enforces. New POs are discovered automatically, processed, and posted to a shared Slack channel within minutes of arriving, with the dollar amount and status attached. When Big Moods launched into a new 100-store boutique chain this spring, standing up the workflow was a scoping conversation, not a hiring plan.

Faire deserves its own mention because it's the story so many brands will recognize. The native integration had quietly broken, and a team member was rebuilding it by hand every day: exporting orders, importing them into ShipStation, then walking tracking numbers and shipping costs back into Faire so reimbursements didn't fall through the cracks. Today that entire loop is automated in both directions, thousands of orders a month, reconciled hourly, with a summary posted to Slack so everyone can see the system confirming its own work.

"The Slack channel is the operating system now. POs show up, get processed, and we see exactly what happened. We stopped wondering what state wholesale was in."

Kollin, Operations, Big Moods

From doing the work to watching the business

Once you run a brand's order flow, you can see things the brand can't. Our fulfillment monitoring watches every order from label creation through delivery and flags the ones going stale. When it surfaced more than a hundred orders sitting in label-created status for over a week this spring, the more valuable finding was diagnostic: it could distinguish orders that were physically stuck from orders that were fine but had stale tracking data, which determines whether you chase your fulfillment partner or fix a sync. That's the difference between an alert and an answer.

That visibility layer now rolls up into executive reporting that ties together Shopify, Faire, ShipStation, SPS, and accounts receivable, so the leadership team gets an operating picture of wholesale that previously didn't exist at any price. The work has progressed from processing orders, to monitoring fulfillment, to answering questions about the business before anyone asks them.

Big Moods pays for this the way you'd pay for a team, because that's what it replaces. Each new function they'd otherwise hire for becomes something we stand up instead, and it arrives already integrated with everything we already run. That's the partnership we're building toward with every brand we work with: operations that compound.

Company: Big Moods, a leading sticker, greeting card, and candle brand
Channels: Shopify DTC, national retail (Cracker Barrel, Target, Bass Pro Shops, and more), thousands of independent retailers via Faire
Stack: Shopify, ShipStation, SPS Commerce, Faire, Google Workspace, Slack, with Agentway as the operating layer across all of it

Your operations probably rhyme with these

If any of this sounded familiar, that's the point. We start with an audit of your workflows, build the first automation against your existing process, and prove it before it runs on its own.