Stock in the wrong place is losing value right now.
Fashion is the only category where the product is worth less every week whether it moves or not. Everything about retail logistics follows from that — the urgency, the returns, the peaks, and why "cheaper per carton" is so often the expensive answer.
A small range is never a small operation
Retailers describe a collection in styles. A warehouse has to handle it in SKUs, and the gap between those two numbers is where fulfilment costs are decided. Multiply it out before you agree a rate per order.
The same box, four different destinations
A container of stock arriving from a supplier has to become four different flows, each with its own packaging, labelling and deadline. Doing that at the warehouse is far cheaper than doing it at the store.
Store replenishment
Picked to a size curve per store, ticketed and delivered ready to go straight onto the floor rather than into a stockroom.
Direct to consumer
Single-unit picks, branded packaging and a carrier cut-off — the most expensive route per item and the most visible.
Marketplace
Someone else's labelling rules, packaging spec and penalties for missing them. Handled to their standard, not ours.
Wholesale
Bulk to a partner's distribution centre, with their compliance requirements met before despatch rather than argued about after.
Every week in the wrong place costs you a step
Logistics decisions in fashion are usually framed as a freight cost. They are actually a markdown decision. A fortnight of extra transit time can move stock a whole step down this ladder, and no saving on carriage covers that.
Fashion returns are not an exception, they are the model
Customers buy three sizes intending to keep one. That is not abuse of the returns policy, it is the policy working — and it means a garment may pass through your warehouse several times before it is finally sold. Every one of those passes has to be quick, or the item is back on sale after the moment has gone.
Send us your SKU count, not your carton count.
Live SKUs, lines per order, return rate and what your peak week looks like against a quiet one. That tells us far more than tonnage — and it lets us tell you honestly whether the cost problem is your freight or your range.
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