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Why we bought our fulfilment centre, and kept the team
It began as the warehouse that shipped our founder’s first brand. Today it sits at the heart of the group. This is how that happened, and why owning your fulfilment can pay off.
Our founder’s first brand shipped from a warehouse he didn’t own. Today he does.
The site was a local warehouse, run by another business owner who also ran a wholesale business from the same building. Orders for that first brand, the first one our founder ever built himself, were packed and sent from there.
Then the owner decided it was time to retire. The chance came up to buy the warehouse, and our founder took it. He also kept the staff on.
Why the team stayed
A warehouse runs on people who know it. They know where everything lives, which orders can’t slip, and how the couriers behave in the week before Christmas. None of that fits in a handover document, and you can’t hire it back quickly once it has walked out of the door.
Keeping the team meant orders carried on going out from day one, packed by the same people who had always packed them.
From packing to running the place
One of the people who stayed is now our Warehouse Manager, Cliff Lawton. He started out on packing and fulfilment, doing the daily work of getting orders out of the door, and he worked his way up from there.
I started out packing orders. When the warehouse changed hands, the team stayed on, and I kept learning every part of the operation until I was running it.
Why owning your fulfilment can pay off
Plenty of brands outsource fulfilment, and for a small brand that is usually the right call. For a group with several brands under one roof, the sums change.
That last point matters more than it sounds. As we wrote in our piece on TikTok Shop, a video that takes off is worth very little if you can’t fulfil the orders it creates.
Beyond the UK
We don’t only ship from home. We also fulfil from a hub in Texas and one in the Netherlands, which puts stock closer to customers in the US and Europe. We own the Texas hub, and an American team runs it day to day. In the Netherlands we hold a large section of a shared site, which the hub’s own teams manage.
The split is deliberate. At home we are hands-on, so we know what good fulfilment looks like. In Texas and the Netherlands, local teams run the day to day, and we can lean on what we have learned at home without running every shift ourselves.
What it means for the brands we buy
When a brand joins the group, it can move its fulfilment into a warehouse we know inside out, run by people who know the work well. If you are thinking about selling, that is the approach we like to take: look after the people who make the business run. Our guide to preparing your brand for sale covers what to get ready first.
