Switching Agents, and Catching a Bad Batch Before It Shipped

Had a new client come aboard today who's moving away from another fulfilment agent, largely because of the new EU import tax changes that kicked in this month. They're doing a steady 5 to 12 orders a day already, which is a healthy amount of volume for someone this early in a switch, and understandably they wanted to move fast rather than sit through a long onboarding process. We talked them through how we operate and got the ball rolling on a proper handover.

The moment I'm actually proudest of today, though, happened quietly in the warehouse. A batch of stock came in from a supplier for one of our standard dropship accounts, and instead of just shelving it and moving on, our team laid it out side by side against the approved reference product. Turned out the new batch was shorter than spec, the stitching pattern was inconsistent, and there were visible defects scattered through the fabric. We flagged it to the client immediately rather than quietly shipping it and hoping nobody noticed. That's the unglamorous side of this business — the saves nobody sees because the bad product never made it to a customer's door.

Also had a good conversation about factory quality with a client who's developing a new version of one of their products with a different manufacturer. We compared notes honestly: their current factory is cheaper but has had real quality and reliability issues lately, the new one costs a touch more but seems to actually give a damn about getting things right. Sometimes the right call really is just paying a bit more.