Blue Sky Bee Supply

When Jamie Morehead and Melanie Seal moved Blue Sky Bee Supply into its Ravenna, Ohio, home in 2012, the former glass company's building came with an unexpected feature: a blue glass facade. Melanie called the match a coincidence. Jamie took it as a sign that Blue Sky was where it belonged.

By then, the business had already come a long way from where it started. Jamie and Melanie began beekeeping in Northeast Ohio in 2004, and Blue Sky Bee Supply eventually grew from that firsthand experience into an ecommerce business supplying beekeepers with equipment, honey packaging, protective gear, and other beekeeping supplies. They started the business from their home, then moved into rented warehouse space as inventory grew before purchasing the Ravenna building in 2012.

By 2014, Blue Sky was shipping beekeeping supplies to customers in all 50 states and internationally, including as far away as New Guinea and Turkey. Jamie and Melanie were still active beekeepers themselves, maintaining 30 hives at the time, including hives on their farm and at certified organic farms in the area. Their customers already ranged from people just getting started to commercial beekeepers managing more than 1,000 hives.

That range is still reflected in the business today.

More Than a Beekeeping Supply Store

A look through Blue Sky's catalog shows how many different jobs happen between maintaining a hive and selling the honey it produces. There are hive bodies, frames, covers, feeders, smokers, gloves, veils, suits, extraction equipment, filters, honey gates, wax-processing equipment, and other tools used throughout the beekeeping process.

Then there is everything needed after the honey leaves the hive. Blue Sky carries glass and plastic honey containers in different shapes and sizes, including the familiar honey bear, along with lids, closures, labels, and other packaging supplies. Some containers sold by the company have even been designed by Jamie and Melanie themselves.

For customers, that variety means they can turn to one supplier for products needed across very different stages of their work. Behind the scenes, however, managing that catalog is more complicated than simply keeping one of every product on a shelf. A product that appears to be a single item in the online store may actually depend on several individual components being available at the same time.

At Blue Sky, that happens thousands of times.

The Catalog Behind the Catalog

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Blue Sky has more than 3,000 kits configured in Ordoro, making product kitting central to the way the company manages its ecommerce inventory. Jamie estimates that roughly 90% of the items Blue Sky lists for sale on Shopify and elsewhere are kits, while many of the individual components behind those products aren't directly orderable by customers.

That creates what is essentially a second catalog behind the one customers see. A shopper may see one finished product available for purchase, but behind that product Blue Sky has to know whether all of the individual pieces needed to fulfill it are actually available. Managing kit inventory means keeping those relationships connected as component quantities change.

Ordoro's kitting logic uses the available quantities of those components to determine how many complete kits Blue Sky can sell. When a kit ships, inventory is reduced from the components that make up the finished product. Some of Blue Sky's products take that structure another level deeper through nested kits, where one kit can itself contain another kit.

For a business where kits represent such a large portion of what customers actually buy, those relationships affect much more than how products are organized in the catalog. Component availability ultimately determines how much finished inventory Blue Sky has available to sell, making kitting a fundamental part of its ecommerce inventory management.

Keeping the Pieces Coming In

Those components also have to make their way into the warehouse. Blue Sky uses purchase orders in Ordoro to order products and components from its suppliers, connecting the purchasing side of the operation with the inventory that ultimately supports those thousands of sellable kits.

There is an important distinction between what Blue Sky buys and inventories and what its customers see for sale. Individual pieces may arrive and be tracked separately, while the finished kit is what eventually appears in a customer's order. That distinction also carries into the financial side of the business, where Blue Sky uses the Ordoro and ConnectBooks integration as part of its accounting workflow.

For Blue Sky, the relationship between individual components and finished products runs from purchasing through inventory and ultimately into the sale. Keeping that relationship intact is especially important when so much of the company's catalog is built from products within products.

From the Warehouse to the Customer

Once an order is ready to leave Blue Sky, there isn't only one way it reaches the customer. For shipped orders, the team creates shipping labels through Ordoro, with FedEx Home Delivery serving as its primary shipping service for many orders.

Other customers are close enough to skip the carrier altogether. Blue Sky's Ravenna location offers dock-side pickup, and those orders have their own workflow inside Ordoro. Pickup orders are tagged so the team can filter them separately from orders that need to be shipped. Once the products are prepared and ready for the customer, the order is marked as shipped without going through the normal carrier workflow.

The two paths give Blue Sky a simple way to manage both ecommerce shipping and local pickup from the same operation. The same business that was shipping orders from Northeast Ohio to New Guinea and Turkey more than a decade ago can also prepare an order for a customer pulling up to the dock in Ravenna.

Built Around the Work They Know

More than two decades after Jamie and Melanie first got into beekeeping, that firsthand connection remains part of Blue Sky Bee Supply. Melanie continues to maintain an active apiary, while Jamie focuses on areas including business development, finance, and marketing. What began at home has grown into an operation serving everyone from hobbyist beekeepers to high-volume honey producers.

The scale and complexity have changed considerably along the way. Behind the products customers see online are thousands of inventory relationships that have to stay connected as components are purchased, products are assembled virtually, orders are placed, and packages make their way out the door or onto the pickup dock.

Ordoro helps Blue Sky manage those relationships across purchasing, inventory, kitting, and fulfillment while the company continues doing what grew out of Jamie and Melanie's own experience with beekeeping: supplying other beekeepers with what they need to do the work.

For Beekeepers, From Beekeepers

What started with Jamie and Melanie's own interest in beekeeping has grown into a business serving beekeepers across the country and beyond. Whether you're setting up your first hive, looking for the right equipment, or getting honey ready for customers, Blue Sky Bee Supply brings firsthand experience to the products and supplies they offer.

Visit Blue Sky Bee Supply.

Your Business Has Its Own Way of Working

No two businesses grow in quite the same way. For Blue Sky, that means thousands of kits, individual components, supplier orders, shipped packages, and customers pulling up to the dock in Ravenna.

Ordoro helps keep those moving pieces connected with inventory management, kitting, purchasing, and fulfillment tools that can adapt to the way your business actually works. See What Ordoro Can Do for Your Business.