Kevin Lawton

You have to have a very steady, predictable business to be able to do that.

Because one, you know, as you said, Noah, like, you know, certainly there's a ton of costs, right?

There's a ton of time that goes into like building out this infrastructure, building up the operation.

You know, there's more labor, more headcount to worry about.

If you have a seasonal dip and influx in demand based on your type of product or your product portfolio, right?

know then you got to manage all that do i want to ramp up my labor you know 100 in october to get ready for the holiday season and then have to tell a bunch of people in the beginning of january that like hey we're letting you go now right or we're cutting these these temps right that's a lot to manage through as well and do you really want to do that or do you want to put that effort and resources into

more marketing more sales like to continue to grow that volume you know where i see a lot of e-commerce brands especially like move to doing their own fulfillment typically it's because like they've had a bad 3pl experience or multiple bad 3pl experiences and they're just at the point where like you know we can't go through this again because you know unfortunately they're

Not every 3PL is perfect or the best.

Right.

And sometimes there is a bad brand fit to the 3PL and what the 3PL specialty is.

And that results in not the performance that the brand would like.

And after a couple of those, you know, brands start to think like, maybe I can just do this myself.

And actually, there's a ton of 3PLs that were started that way.

And all of a sudden they become a 3PL in addition to like a brand.

So I do think those are some of the factors to weigh in there versus like self-fulfillment versus outsourcing.

But I think if you have steady kind of some predictable demand and you're able to support that and maybe there's some uniqueness to it, probably makes sense to do a little more self-fulfillment.

fulfillment.

But if your demand is, you know, a little up and down and, you know, there's a lot of kind of management to worry about in terms of the operation and the labor fluctuations, then 3PL is probably like a better route to go.

You know, we've seen such an evolution of just fulfillment, warehousing, logistics in general in the last few years.

It's been very interesting because unintentionally starting my podcast in 2019, I've seen a lot of this kind of firsthand, like a huge kind of influx in 3PL startups too as well.