Located 15 minutes south of Barrie, in Innisfil, Ontario, Stone Horse Farm is a small-scale, family-owned, pasture-raised livestock business. Lisa and her family produce chicken, pork, and rabbits on land that was first farmed in 1880. All the animals are raised with the highest possible attention to detail to provide a natural diet and life for them and, in turn, provide customers with the highest quality meats.
Lisa and her family started Stone Horse Farm in 2003. Over the past 15 years, they have been slowly growing their brand, mostly by selling at the century farm and local farmers’ markets.
By mid-2018, the growing popularity for Stone Horse products started to create just as many problems as opportunities. Lisa started to experience the frustrations of tracking orders from multiple sources. Various communication channels combined with fluctuating inventory created order errors, and Lisa found that half the time, customers would reach out to order, but she didn’t have what they were asking for in inventory.
Before using Local Line, Lisa would receive orders from her Facebook page, messenger, email, phone call, and text. During the day, each time she received an order, she would manually type them into an online notebook. Later that evening, she would again manually copy them over into a spreadsheet. As you can imagine, this multi-step process was time-consuming and error-prone.
After a couple of months of these errors repeating themselves, Lisa started to think about better solutions. She needed a way to lighten the load, track and communicate her inventory with customers, and automatically generate pick-lists. Thankfully, that was the time that her Local Line sales rep reached out, wondering if there was a way we could help Stone Horse Farms!
Now that Lisa’s been up and running on Local Line for over six months, she considers Local Line her personal sales assistant. We asked her what Local Line does for her, and she said,
“Well…Local Line does everything for me! I tell customers it is my personal secretary and encourage them to use the embedded store on my website. Now, all of my orders are clearly listed for me before I ship animals to the butcher. I can be sure to have the custom work detailed before they need it, which simplifies my logistics and helps me manage customer expectations.”
For Lisa, the biggest benefit of Local Line has been saving her time and keeping her organized. And now that she’s back in control of her orders, Lisa will focus on increasing her inventory. As she scales up, she’ll use her Local Line account as a marketing tool to help drive new business.
We’ve loved being able to play a small part in all the success at Stone Horse Farm, and we’ll be with Lisa every step of the way as she continues her journey!
If you want to see all the great things Stone Horse Farms has to offer, check out their online store!
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