Three New Leads Before Lunch, and a Parcel That Didn't Make It

Some mornings the inbound just doesn't stop. Within about twenty minutes of each other today, three completely different people reached out cold looking for a sourcing and fulfillment partner: one building a new brand around summer cooling gadgets — think portable fans, neck coolers, that whole category — another looking for a long-term agent specifically for a foot massager they wanted to sell into the German market, and a third running an eBay store who wanted better pricing on some fairly technical items. Totally different products, totally different people, all landing in the same short window. That's genuinely what a lot of our mornings look like — a scattershot of "is this thing possible" messages before anyone's even had coffee.

On the existing-client side, the EU tax change from July 1st kept rippling outward. One of the harder conversations today was telling a client that a batch of their parcels — shipped before the 1st but still in transit — could no longer clear customs under the new rules and would have to be destroyed rather than delivered. Not a fun message to send. Nobody likes being the bearer of "the rules changed mid-flight and there's nothing we can do about these specific packages," but better to say it plainly than let it drag out.

We also spent a chunk of the day deep in the weeds with a beauty brand on packaging and delivery logistics — postal codes, specifically, and how different courier systems in Latin America handle addresses without one. It's a genuinely tricky problem: require a postal code and you might lose orders from customers who don't reliably have one; skip it and packages get stuck in limbo. No clean answer, just a lot of back-and-forth trying to find the least-bad option.

Ended the day feeling like we talked to twenty different businesses about twenty different problems, which, most days, is basically the job.