Therabody Cuts Trading Partner Onboarding Time in Half with SPS Commerce Fulfillment
Therabody is a Los Angeles-based wellness technology company whose story began in 2008, when founder Dr. Jason Wersland invented Theragun. Best known for the Theragun percussive massage device, it has grown into a recovery and wellness ecosystem spanning compression, skincare, and sleep devices. Therabody is a manufacturer and supplier selling through big-box retailers, dropship retailers, and direct-to-consumer through its own e-commerce site. The business is seasonal, with order volume peaking around the holidays, and has worked with SPS Commerce since 2019.
The challenge:
Fast-growing order volume and new retail partners were outpacing a manual process.
The solution:
SPS Fulfillment automates orders into NetSuite.
The result:
Therabody cuts onboarding time in half while scaling order volume without adding headcount for manual order review.
The Challenge
Lee Rice Epstein is Therabody’s Director of Business Applications. Since Lee joined, the team has moved through three order management systems: an original NetSuite instance, a stretch running order management through Salesforce, and a new NetSuite instance today. Each retail customer arrives with its own complex order rules and requirements. Therabody’s business is also concentrated around a few peak months each year, when big-box, dropship, and e-commerce orders all land at once. Before Therabody built automation into the pipeline, that combination meant a small team could get buried reviewing orders by hand.
The Solution
The SPS Commerce integration with NetSuite is the front door for Therabody’s order management, accepting EDI orders directly into NetSuite under the rules each retail customer sets. This gives Therabody faster, more accurate order intake with less manual effort, helping the team meet each retailer’s requirements and scale retail relationships with confidence. Built on SPS Fulfillment, the integration gives Therabody’s warehouses visibility into orders, so the team adds sales volume without adding people to review orders by hand.
Lee’s team is now leveraging MAX to get answers in seconds on specific orders and retailer requirements, like whether a retailer’s ASN should ship carton or pallet, without leaving the platform to dig through rulebooks and raw EDI.
Sales forecasting, revenue reporting, and sell-through reporting used to come from sources that did not speak the same language, each needing manual spreadsheet work. Through Open Share SPS Decision Intelligence, Therabody now brings SPS sales and inventory data directly into Power BI alongside NetSuite sales data, so the sales team can see the full picture in one place.
“Our sales forecasting and revenue reporting used to speak different languages, all pieced together by hand in Excel. Now that Open Share gives us that data directly, shipment volume is up nearly 30% year to date.”
— Lee Rice Epstein, Director, Business Applications, Therabody, Inc.
The Results
Therabody has relied more on EDI this past year than ever before. Therabody’s EDI unit volume through SPS Commerce has grown nearly 50% year-over-year, with EDI shipment volume up nearly 30% over the same period, and the growth has held consistently. Average trading partner onboarding time has been cut in half, with preflight checks, custom scripts, and the SPS Commerce integration with NetSuite helping reduce manual review as the business grows. The partnership has also expanded into new channels, spanning national retail, e-commerce, specialty, international, and institutional accounts. International consumer electronics accounts have delivered particularly strong growth, including several markets with triple-digit gains alongside expansion into additional European channels.
“Across the board, our average trading partner onboarding time is twice as fast with SPS Commerce. We onboarded a dropship retailer a week ahead of schedule.”
— Lee Rice Epstein, Director, Business Applications, Therabody, Inc.
On the Decision Intelligence side, bringing SPS retail data directly into Power BI through Open Share replaced a process where multiple people built their own manual reports, and visibility could be lost when someone was out.
The team is actively onboarding more retail customers, and because the preflight check and warehouse integration do not require a person to review every order, that growth has not required additional headcount for manual order review.
Lessons Learned
After leading Therabody’s order management transformation, Lee shares what he’s learned from reshaping Therabody’s approach.
- Actively engage with your vendors as strategic partners. Leverage their expertise to ask what you could or should be doing better. Invite them to be your innovation thought partners.
- Calm down. It’s tempting to treat every fire as an emergency, but most of it gets done. Staying calm is what lets you actually think through the fix instead of just reacting to it.
- Treat every challenge as a chance to design for the future. Before you patch something, decide whether you’re solving the real problem or just papering over a symptom you’ll have to solve again in three years, and be careful where you customize.
To learn more about SPS Commerce solutions, request a demo today.
If we were to look at companies that deliver good products native to NetSuite and have a demonstrated success in the marketplace, SPS fits that mold perfectly.
— Lee Rice Epstein, Director, Business Applications, Therabody, Inc.