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How OTW Shipping Does Warehousing Differently

Founder Evan Tripp spent two years crafting a light-up hand that sticks in your car window called Flik. 

Flik could light up to show different common driver hand gestures visibly. You could create a waving hand when you wanted someone to pass or raise a middle finger when you wanted to scold another driver. It was quickly popular as a product sold on Amazon.

But despite his success online, Evan almost lost his business by choosing the wrong logistics provider.

Like most founders, Evan fulfilled out of his own home until orders picked up. Then he started using Fulfillment by Amazon. It worked fine at first, but the little problems became bigger problems at scale.

Once Evan sold out of all his products in the Amazon warehouse for the first time, he immediately sent over a much larger shipment for them to stock. However, the new products sat in Amazon’s warehouse waiting to be received by customers and were never released. Orders subsequently went unfulfilled for a month while eager customers waited for Flik to ship. By the time they’d shipped, many were complaining to Evan.

Even worse, Amazon began canceling orders randomly. Evan was forced to start fulfilling orders out of this house once again alongside shipping with Amazon. Their poor service was starting to prevent his Flik from growing.

Evan finally came to OTW Shipping because he wanted a better option. Once he started working with us, he was able to relax and focus on his product and marketing while we took care of scaling his logistics. He still works with us today.

Here’s what we do differently at OTW Shipping that brings businesses like Evan’s to our service and leaves them satisfied along with a bit of the OTW philosophy for fulfillment.

Read more of Evan’s story on our blog.

Should You Use Small Warehouses or VC-Backed Warehouses?

Before we start, we want to make sure you’re aware of the kinds of competition a 3PL warehouse like us is up against.

Third-party logistics businesses(3PLs) tend to fall into two extremes: mom-and-pop shops and the venture-backed big boys.

Mom-and-pop shops are great when you’re small. They’re relatively cheap, there are usually only one or two people in the warehouse, and you may even have the owner on speed dial. 

However, if you go from a few hundred orders per month to 5,000 orders a month,  they almost assuredly can’t keep up. With platforms like TikTok, where virality creates volatile sales, you could be in trouble if you choose to stay with a small operation without much technology.

On the other end of the scale, you have the big guys. You’ve probably heard of most of them by now. They’re often backed by VCs and are optimized to scale quickly, with maximum profitability for investors, rather than the best customer experience.

Unlike your mom-and-pop, large 3PLs usually utilize more sophisticated warehouse management software to aid your operations. However, when things go wrong – and things go wrong every day in logistics – smaller businesses (we’re talking under 2,500 orders per month) struggle to get the time of day from customer support. ShipBob, for example, only has certain office hours for any customer doing under 400 orders per month. That’s not conducive to a symbiotic relationship.

When we made OTW Shipping, we thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if there were more businesses that could do both? A business with great software and warehousing? A business that boasts both scale and responsive customer support?”.

Today, we’ve successfully paved the middle road for fulfillment centers. We simultaneously ship thousands of orders per day for one client and 10 orders per day for another client, with both partners getting the same in-house fulfillment level experience. We have already helped brands go from shipping a few hundred orders per month in-house to shipping 1,000+ orders per day in as little as 30 days. All on the back of exceptional customer service, great software, and a handful of other traits that set us apart.

Check out our article on when to look for a new 3PL provider.

Why OTW is Different From Other 3PL Providers

OTW Shipping is Bicoastal

We currently run our warehouses out of Salt Lake City, Utah, and Hartford, Connecticut. While that alone does not make us unique, when you work with us, we’ll run an analysis based on your order data. Based on that, we determine which location makes sense for you for the quickest shipping times and the cheapest postage costs. At scale, utilizing both locations may be the answer instead! We’ll crunch the numbers so you don’t have to, to make sure you’re making the best decision for your business.

We Are Selective

We would rather do a few things really well, then do everything just OK. So, sometimes it’s good to say no. While apparel is hot, we know that it requires huge numbers of low-volume SKUs and a large dedicated space for returns. It’s not ideal for logistics businesses to fulfill most apparel unless they specialize in it.

By not trying to please everyone, we can utilize our space to become more efficient and cost-effective and pass those savings on to you. We know you don’t want to end up paying the price for another customer’s complicated order processes.

That doesn’t mean we aren’t flexible. If you sell some merch in your store on the side and need a provider, feel free to give us a call, we can make it work. If you have kitting, we’ve got that covered too.

We also let you ship with custom packaging and allow you to pack whatever inserts you want inside.

We’re Always On Call

We started OTW shipping hoping we could make ourselves feel like your own personal warehouse team. It takes a lot to trust the final touchpoint for your brand experience with someone, and we want you to remain connected to that process.

Customer support at large fulfillment businesses usually has no idea what’s happening in their warehouses. The team is usually based in a call center somewhere and needs to spend extra time chatting with the warehouse to figure out any issues with your order.

That’s why we use Ryver, a channel-based application like Slack to chat with you. You’ll have the warehouse team on call during normal business hours and support often outside of them too.



A Ryver interface screenshot
A Ryver interface screenshot

Instead of interacting with a ticket portal or an account rep who hasn’t been in the warehouse with your product, you have direct access to your account rep and a warehouse team member who handles your product every day. If things heat up, our founders, Nick and Parker, are always on standby too.

We’re Scalable

Finally, and perhaps most important for our clients, we can help you go from 10 to 1,000+ orders per day quickly and reliably. We do that using customized workflows and state of the art software like ShipHero. ShipHero helps us build, automate, and personalize workflows for clients to save you time and resources. It also integrates easily into all of your POS channels.


And on our end, ShipHero helps us easily modify our pick and pack workflows for clients as they grow. It also helps us find and solve inefficiencies in slotting, pack station setup, and pick paths. We also use it for features like rateshopping among postage providers so you can make sure you are getting each package where it needs to go, when it needs to get there, at the best possible price. 


Our software isn’t the only thing that scales. Like many 3PLs, we’re a growing business (we’ve taken on substantially more orders every single year we’ve operated) and are more than willing to expand alongside our clientele.


Now that you know what we’re about, the choice is yours. Do you want to risk the growth of your brand on a giant business that views you as a number or do you want to work with a company that wants to be your partner?


If the latter sounds more like your style, give us a call. We’re excited to help you grow.

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