Logistics Startup Fabric Expands Partnership With Israel’s Leading Pharmacy Chain

By Simona Shemer, NoCamels May 18, 2021 4 minutes

A Fabric ground robot. Courtesy

Fabric, the Israeli-founded warehouse automation logistics startup, announced this month that it will be expanding its partnership with Israeli pharmacy giant Super-Pharm following the “great success” of its past cooperation with the health and beauty retailer over the last past two years to develop “the world’s smallest automated fulfillment center.” The company said it will build and operate a second micro-fulfillment center that will carry out thousands of orders a day to provide Super-Pharm customers with on-demand, same-day, and next-day delivery nationwide.

In April 2018, NoCamels reported that Super-Pharm had struck a deal with Fabric (then known as Commonsense Robotics) to operate a logistics center where products would be automatically packed by robots. While the partnership was successful, over the next two years, the demand for Super-Pharm’s e-commerce offering grew, and Fabric decided to increase the number of orders it fulfills for the pharmacy chain through micro-fulfillment services. Fabric said the second center will meet this volume increase, speed up deliveries, and scale Super-Pharm’s online presence.

The new site “will work in tandem with Super-Pharm’s existing Fabric-operated micro-fulfillment center in the Tel Aviv metro area,” Fabric said in a statement.

“With the addition of the new site, we will be more than tripling the number of orders we fulfill for Super-Pharm. With the expanded partnership, 90 percent of Super-Pharm’s home delivery orders will be fulfilled through one of our micro-fulfillment centers,” Elram Goren, CEO and co-founder of Fabric, tells NoCamels.

The goal, he explains, is “to continue enabling Super-Pharm to scale their eCommerce business profitably while serving their customers exceptional experiences.”

“Expanding our partnership with Super-Pharm is a significant milestone for Fabric,” he said in the company’s statement. “As a returning customer, our expanding partnership is based on real and measured success, and we are thankful to Super-Pharm for their continued trust in Fabric.”

A Fabric micro-fulfillment center. Courtesy

Founded in 2015, Fabric moved its commercial headquarters to the US in 2019, but its product and R&D center remains in Israel. The company also has commercial operations with Israeli supermarket chain Rami Levy.

Fabric developed micro-fulfillment centers as a logistics solution to combat the challenge of slow and expensive manual fulfillment centers and meet the expectations of e-commerce customers. The New York-based company, which raised $110 million in a Series B round in late 2019, provides two kinds of solutions. In the grocery sector, the company offers retailers the opportunity to convert parts of their store into such a micro-fulfillment center where online orders would be packed by robots. The centers, which would be operated by both robots and humans, would also be responsible for scheduling orders and delivering them within minutes. The second aspect is to create multi-tenant locations in urban centers that make on-demand fulfillment profitable for ecommerce sellers locating automation physically close to end-customers.

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Fabric provides the robots, the warehouse management system, and the algorithm that combines the complex services to offer clients flexibility and responsiveness.

Fabric’s first micro-fulfillment center in a parking garage beneath a skyscraper in central Tel Aviv in late 2018, caught the attention of Walmart, which then tapped Fabric as one of three robotic firms with which it wanted to partner to build automated fulfillment centers.

How Fabric’s micro-fulfillment solution works

“With these partners, we’ll be testing different orientations and add-on innovations to understand what works best in different environments. For example, in some locations, we’ll be adding on to our stores. In others, the fulfillment centers will sit inside the existing store footprint,” Walmart said in an announcement at the time.

The future of eCommerce

In 2020, Super-Pharm Online was voted the most popular eCommerce website in Israel, according to a survey conducted by the Israel Postal Company, which said 24 percent of Israelis ordered from the website last year.

The company said that it was able to increase the number of orders fulfilled out of Super-Pharm’s Tel Aviv micro-fulfillment center by up to 250 percent, throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

“The past year has been challenging for many retailers who have been required to support such rapid growth in online activity. We are proud to be part of the infrastructure that supported this growth and look forward to continuing to enable the best online experience for Super-Pharm’s customers,” Goren said.

“In order to provide the best possible customer experience, Super-Pharm needs to have a complex 360 degree logistics solution for picking and delivery” said Yossi Cohen, VP Organization and Information Systems at Super-Pharm. “The partnership with Fabric puts us at the forefront of innovation and enables us to pick orders quickly and efficiently.”

“After a successful operation of the first site and due to the increase in activity we are expanding the partnership,” he added. We are expecting that the new site will contribute even more to improve the service and efficiency of our online activity, and it’s a partnership with the potential to continue growing and expanding over time.”