Kevin Lawton

well, just coming out of the pandemic because e-commerce was such a huge boom, right?

And people were like, okay, there's an opportunity here.

We've seen some of those kind of fade out now.

There is such a large spectrum of fulfillment providers, right?

From these huge kind of institutions in the industry offering services for everybody else to somebody that has 2,000 square foot space and is doing like a very specialized thing for

for brands, right?

And which is incredibly interesting and I think really makes the, you know, challenges the idea of all we do is, you know, take a product, put it in a box and put it on a truck, right?

There's a lot more complexity to it, which I think, you know, lends itself to the reason that there are so many different fulfillment providers out there.

But

you know, what happens over the next five years.

We're starting to see, and we're at a point where technology is certainly becoming a huge factor in the success of these fulfillment providers.

While brands are not necessarily concerned about what the technology is, like certainly I've heard some stories where brands are like, oh, you know, I want to use a 3PL that has robots, right?

Because they just think like that's going to be

better which is not always the case and i've certainly heard 3pls too that like hey we have robots and we roll them out for customer tours because it looks good right we don't necessarily use them to their full ability right and that's i love i love that idea that's another for show pony robots basically yes yeah yeah it's like oh customers coming in bring out the robots customers not here and we kind of only like 50 utilize the robots or maybe not even at all right just for show so

Technology, where it's coming to be a pivotal thing, is really that the expectation of the brand on the kind of data and information that they want to see, right?

They're wanting greater visibility because their consumer, their customer is wanting greater visibility.

So fulfillment providers need to evolve to be able to provide that disability.

You know, anybody listening to this is a consumer, right?

Whether you work in the industry or not, you're a consumer of something.

We've become accustomed to wanting that thing and getting it within a short time.