The Challenge

Fastachi has been roasting nuts for 35 years. Over that time, Souren Etyemezian built the business through retail stores, wholesale distribution, farmers markets, Amazon, private jets, spas, department stores, and more. At its peak, the brand operated six retail locations.

Then COVID hit. Five stores closed. And Souren made a deliberate decision to pull back from channels that consumed the most labor and time, and build a focused online gifting business instead.

Two problems collided at once. Fastachi's ecommerce platform had become a security liability after five to seven years on it as the site was repeatedly hacked, badly enough at times to lock down credit card processing and take checkout offline. A platform switch stopped being optional.

At the same time, Fastachi already had a growing base of corporate gifting customers, most of them people who had tasted the product personally and came back at the holidays with a spreadsheet, and the process for handling those orders was falling apart on its own. A single client with 40 addresses meant importing a spreadsheet where one formatting error could break the whole order.

Both problems had to be solved on the same short timeline, heading straight into the highest-volume weeks of the year.

The Solution

Fastachi moved to Shopify and integrated Send to Many in the same push, in Q3 2024, going live right before the holiday season, not as two separate projects but as one migration solving both problems at once.

Send to Many is the Shopify app that turns a spreadsheet of recipients into individual, ready-to-fulfill orders. It handles taking a list of names and addresses and converting it into clean, validated orders inside Shopify, so Fastachi can focus on everything else, the product, the packaging, the fulfillment.

For Fastachi, that meant replacing a manual process where one bad line in a spreadsheet could break an entire 40-address order. Send to Many's bulk order import now validates each address, attaches a personalized gift message per recipient, and generates the individual orders directly in Shopify. If one line item had an error before, the whole import could fail. Now the data flows in correctly the first time.

Souren's approach to corporate gifting is deliberately lean. Product quality comes first; packaging is kept as simple as possible to make shipping reliable and operations manageable. 

Results

• Fastachi launched corporate gifting on Shopify in Q3 2024 and processed orders through the full holiday season without the manual spreadsheet bottlenecks of prior years

• Corporate orders now arrive through a self-service flow, with Send to Many processing addresses and gift messages cleanly into Shopify

• The brand closed its Amazon store and pulled back from wholesale to free up capacity for e-commerce and gifting, reducing the operational load that had been consuming the team through most of the year

• Fastachi has begun mailing physical corporate gifting catalogs, with plans to send three to four per year to stay in front of existing clients

  
  

Key Use Cases

Multi-recipient corporate orders Clients upload a recipient list and Fastachi fulfills from a single location. Send to Many's bulk order import validates each address and attaches a gift message per recipient automatically, so the team isn't manually checking spreadsheets during peak season.

Recipient-as-future-customer Souren's view on corporate gifting is straightforward: "If you order a package that has 40 addresses, those 40 packages are going to turn into 40 new customers. Make sure it's packed well. If the product is good, they can become 40 new customers for you." Every corporate order is treated as an acquisition opportunity for the brand.

Protecting the shipment Because nuts ship over several days rather than arriving same-day like fresh baked goods, the risk moves to transit. Souren's rule is not to cheap out on the box. Spending an extra dollar on sturdy shipping materials is cheaper than refunding a damaged $40 order.

What Makes It Work

Fastachi's corporate gifting model is built on simplicity at every layer. Fewer SKUs, standardized packaging, clean order imports. The goal is to make the busy season as manageable as possible, not more elaborate.

On preparing for peak season, Souren's advice is to buy packaging early as it doesn't go bad and you can use it the following year. Book ingredients even earlier. Nuts are a commodity grown once a year, and supply problems don't announce themselves in November.

On retention, Fastachi is going back to physical mail. Printed catalogs sent to corporate clients several times a year keep the brand visible between seasons, when most gifting companies go quiet.

On growth, the flywheel is organic. Clients who received Fastachi as a gift become repeat buyers. Some of them eventually become corporate gifters themselves, sending to their own clients and employees. That's how the business has grown without outbound sales, one good package at a time.

Souren joined Cam on a live webinar to talk through how Fastachi handles corporate gifting at scale, without a dedicated sales team or complex operations. Watch the full conversation.