At Fast Track Products, owner Liz Hennings and her team handle a large annual uniform order for a longtime distributor client. Last year, Hennings proposed a new approach: Instead of the distributor managing the entire order, they would drop-ship the product directly to Fast Track, and Hennings’ team would verify and process the items as they arrived.
“It’s a complex order — more than 500 scrub tops need to be personalized with employee names and individually bagged, along with bottoms for 100 employees that must be shipped to two separate locations,” Hennings explains.
After taking over receiving and fulfillment, Hennings and her team worked through a few minor hiccups and streamlined the process. “Our distributor client said she experienced way fewer issues compared to handling the bagging and shipping herself,” Hennings says. “She was more than happy to pay us to do all that work instead of spending a week sorting and shipping the orders.”
It’s a clear example of how contract decorators can offer major value to their distributor partners — not just in decoration, but also in logistics and fulfillment, by working together as partners. We spoke with experienced decorators to learn five key ways they foster more productive partnerships with distributors.
Read the full feature on Apparelist.
