Double H Nurseries

Family-owned Double H Nurseries, the UK's largest houseplant supplier with over 1.5 million orchids in production at any given time, built its business around a B2B wholesale model serving supermarkets and major retailers. When COVID-19 lockdowns hit the UK in March 2020 — just days after the company broke its single-week sales record of 300,000 orchids for Mother's Day — retail demand evaporated overnight. Unlike most industrial goods, orchids spoil if left warehoused too long and take a year to grow. Without a way to move existing inventory, Double H faced significant product losses with no viable channel to reach consumers.

Burton's team launched a Shopify storefront within five days, but order volume quickly outpaced their manual process: operators were handed bundles of shipping labels and packing slips from exported CSVs and told to match them by hand. After failing to find affordable off-the-shelf fulfillment software, Double H began a free trial of Tulip's low-code operations platform. Within two weeks, the team had built and deployed a suite of apps — without a dedicated IT team — covering order ingestion, batch scheduling, pick-list generation, packing guidance, and label printing. Tulip integrated directly with Shopify for order data, FedEx for shipping labels, SAP for live inventory updates, and the facility's label printers for hardware connectivity. Supervisors gained a scheduling terminal to assign and prioritize batches; operators worked from a single consolidated screen eliminating all loose paperwork.

Double H scaled from 20 orders per day to 3,500 orders per day, a 175x increase in daily throughput, within weeks of going live on Tulip — all without hiring a dedicated IT or systems team. The full order management system, including third-party integrations, was operational within 4 weeks of starting the project.

• Eliminated CSV-based manual matching of shipping labels and packing slips
• Enabled batch sorting and optimized pick sequencing, reducing fulfillment errors
• Real-time inventory sync to SAP replaced manual stock reconciliation
• Operations team adopted the platform without prior digital manufacturing experience

• Speed matters more than perfection in a crisis: Double H launched before their fulfillment process was ready, then digitized under live load — a pragmatic sequencing that preserved revenue.
• Low-code platforms lower the barrier for non-tech manufacturers: No IT department was required; operations staff built and owned the solution.
• Integration depth determines scalability: Connecting Shopify, FedEx, SAP, and hardware in a single workflow eliminated the manual handoffs that caused bottlenecks.
• Pilot on real volume, not a sandbox: Double H went from free trial to 3,500 daily orders without a formal IT procurement cycle, compressing what typically takes months into weeks.