Christine Warren is an executive leader in logistics operations, account management, and client success. Tune into this MyFBAPrep interview to learn key shipping strategies, how to think about logistics, 3PL mistakes to avoid, what to ask before choosing a fulfillment partner, and much more.

Transcript below.

Christine’s background

Rachel Andrea Go: Thank you, Christine, for coming on to the MyFBAPrep Series. To get things started, could you please tell me more about your background and how you ended up in eCommerce logistics?

Christine Warren: Sure. So, very early in my career, I was in sales and technology and technology staffing. I was introduced to GSI Commerce, which is my first ecom role, through a friend of a friend. I believe they hired me—I had a very strong sales background and client management background. Really, 20 years ago, not a lot of people had eCommerce experience; it was really the beginning of this. So, I had the opportunity there to work with an absolutely brilliant CEO. [I] Learned a ton. My boss at the time used to refer to GSI as “the Harvard of ecom,” because we managed all aspects, so, the web store, call centers, marketing, payments, tax, fraud, and, of course, fulfillment. So, I spent about 13 years there and then on to other 3PLs, 4PLs since then.

Pinpoint logistical needs and ask deeper questions

Rachel Andrea Go: Amazing. And since you have so much knowledge and experience on the logistics side, I wanted to ask: So, a lot of sellers think of logistics as something they would rather not have to think about at all, but how should brands think about their shipping and fulfillment strategies?

Christine Warren: So, I love that question because—and if you talk to teams that have worked with me before, I would always tell my brands that fulfillment should be something that they don’t have to think about. However, they have to keep an eye on it, right?

So, when I would get a new client, the first thing we would talk about was what the customers—what their end customers expect and balancing that with cost management, and that is how we would determine the strategy. So, for example, if you have a very high-end product — I’ve worked with very high-end ecom brands — presentation is important to them, but balancing that with cost management. So, I had one brand, for example, who put their product in a bag, thinking, lighter weight, lower cost. But what we found was the bag would flatten out, wasn’t taped all the way, and would result in extreme shipping charges. So, we worked with them, with their marketing team, to create a box, smaller, under dim, beautiful unboxing experience for their customer, and that was really important.

The other, always talked about aspect of ecom is the two-day delivery, right? So, do you need to spend the money and the time and invest in getting your product to your end customer within two days? I would argue, if your product is a commodity, right, or easily gotten — I can go to the store and get it, I can go somewhere else and get it in two days — then probably. But, if it is something that is difficult to get—so, I have a son who wears size 17 sneakers. It is very difficult for me to get those. I am very willing to wait five to seven days to get those sneakers. That brand, I would say, does not need to invest in that two-day shipping.

Rachel Andrea Go: I’ve also heard a lot of strategies around turning your shipping into a revenue driver as well. So, if your customers are willing to pay for that faster shipping, you can even turn it into a profit-making machine on your brand’s behalf.

Christine Warren: You can, certainly for your higher-end product. Absolutely.

Rachel Andrea Go: So, what are some of the biggest logistics mistakes that you’ve seen brands make?

Christine Warren: So, I’m going to put it all into one mistake, which is not asking deeper questions, right? So, I’ve seen so many RFPs, had a million conversations with brands, and they’ll ask the first question, but not the deeper one. So, I’ll give you an example there: So, your food and beverage brands — expiration date and lock codes are critical, right? You ask your 3PL or your potential 3PL, “Do you track them?” Their answer will be probably yes. But what you really want to know is, what does that look like? So, how do you enter the lock code? Is it scanned? Is it hand typed? If it’s hand typed, obviously, there could be mistakes. Is there an alert when inventory is expiring? Do you ship FIFO? Do you pick FIFO? What does this look like? You need those answers to those deeper questions.

On the flip side, brands also have a responsibility. So, when you talk about mistakes—so, I’m going to give you my favorite client expectation, which is — and it’s happened multiple times, especially for very small product — I’m the brand; I’m going to send you product without barcodes. And my response would be, well, we can’t track it without a barcode. Most 3PLs can put a barcode onto product. [We] Don’t want that because aesthetically, [it] doesn’t look good for our customers. Well, if I can’t scan it, it doesn’t exist, right? So, then you don’t have inventory integrity. So, 3PLs certainly have a responsibility, but brands can make internal mistakes as well.

And then the last thing I wanted to mention is the—not putting eyes on the process before signing up, right? You can hear things, you can see things in print in a contract, but until you actually see the process, and if you can’t get there getting a video of the process for your critical processes, it’s really important to do that.

How to spot a strong 3PL (and keep them)

Rachel Andrea Go: So, it’s clear you’ve worked with a lot of brands and a lot of 3PLs in your career. What are some of the things that set the best 3PLs apart?

Christine Warren: So, I could talk about efficiencies and automation and process and location and all of those things. There are some 3PLs that are better than others, clearly. Those are just table stakes, and it depends on what the brand actually needs. My real answer to that is the best 3PLs are ones that can have honest and productive conversations with brands, right? So, that’s everything from setting expectations to business reviews to, “Hey, I messed something up,” or something isn’t working and being able to get on the phone and have a productive conversation with the brands. And then, on the flip side, the best brands are the ones that assume good intent, right? Assume that a 3PL is trying to do their best and that they are a business that also needs to be profitable.

Rachel Andrea Go: You mentioned RFPs. Can you really quickly — for, you know, some of the brands and listeners who aren’t familiar with that — what is an RFP, and what questions should a brand ask before selecting a 3PL?

Christine Warren: Sure. So, RFP is a request for proposal, right? So, it’s where you, as a brand, would give your basic information — so, your number of orders per day, units per order, lines per order — give that to 3PLs, and they would then respond with pricing. The questions are super interesting. It’s so nuanced depending on what your product is. So, I, personally, have a list of 150 questions, and those drill down into those deep questions. What RFPs tend to focus on — which is important, I’m not discounting it — but are things like, what are the SLAs? How quickly are you going to ship my stuff? How quickly are you going to receive my product? Those are basics. They should be asked, they should be answered, but it’s really those deeper questions, and it would take me a very long time to read those 150 questions. But I would find somebody who knows what they’re doing, who has been through RFPs, and work with them on what those questions are.

Rachel Andrea Go: What are the most important procedures brands and 3PLs should follow to ensure a smooth partnership between the two?

Christine Warren: So, expectation-setting [is] number one. So, basics: How do we work together? What are the receiving guidelines? SLAs — how SLAs are calculated, right? Because you can get an SLA—again, that’s one of those deeper questions, how is that metric produced? Inventory reporting, shrink calculations, and timing of shrink calculations. What happens if something is stolen, right? That happens sometimes. So, what do we agree [on]? So, I would have my teams put together, basically, a one-pager. Here’s what the contract says. I would share that with the client. We would agree that we’re agreeing. I would share that with my internal operations team, right? Internally saying, “This is what we’ve promised, and this is what we need to reach in terms of SLAs.”

Responsiveness — so, how quickly can a brand expect root cause and resolution for an issue? It is very challenging, and sometimes, just personally, my heart would hurt working with a very small brand who has one order that is mispicked or lost. They’ve only shipped 50 orders, right? So, it’s very impactful to them, that one order, but it may not be as impactful to my 3PL, right? That’s one order out of the 10,000 I shipped today. So, balancing that expectation of root cause and resolution, agreeing upon a communication and cadence, and escalation process.

So, typically, I would have weekly meetings, my teams would have weekly meetings with the brand. Here’s what we’re going to talk about during those meetings. Here’s the expectation in terms of agenda. If something goes wrong, here’s how you escalate. So, particularly during peak, I would have kind of an escalation flowchart. If something happens, that’s kind of a little concerning, here’s where you go bigger and bigger and bigger. And here’s what we do in a priority-one escalation.

And then, again, focusing on the brand expectations. The brands really need to show up to meetings and not go to the top for every issue, right? You have people on the ground at 3PLs who—their job is to make sure that you are happy and satisfied. So, showing up to those weekly meetings—imagine, right? How do you feel if you have something set, and then somebody is just a no-show? Or, every week, they’re late, 15 minutes late? That shows your 3PL that they are not a priority, and that’s a problem, because they really should be.

And then meaningful business reviews. So, I focus on two things: One is aligning the business reviews with the goals and the language of the customer. So, that means—so, for example, I had a customer in the sporting goods industry, and they referred to their customers as athletes. So, when I’m doing my business reviews, I also use that language.

And then, in those business reviews, acknowledging the past, right? So, we’ll talk a little bit about metric. I always use it, like, 5% past, 95% future, because we all know what happened. We’ve all lived through the metrics. If there is something that was concerning or something that the 3PL needed to address, we want to acknowledge it, right? So, not mentioning it isn’t okay either. But really, a business review is to say, “Here’s where we are, and here’s what our goal is, and here’s how we’re going to get here in this period of time.” And then pulling out that last business review every time you do the next business review to see how you are collectively as partners reaching those goals.

Rachel Andrea Go: So, out of curiosity, how often would you recommend a small versus a medium versus an enterprise brand do these business reviews?

Christine Warren: So, that’s a very good question. I don’t like the term “QBR” for that reason, right? “Quarterly” is not … I don’t like “quarterly.” I like “three times a year,” right? It gives you enough time to accomplish something, right? And it also falls—so, most clients, not all, most clients have peaks during Christmas or holiday time. So, we would have a, you know, August planning for peak and February post-peak, and then one in the middle for kind of the day-to-day business. For the enterprise accounts, the very large accounts, we’d have multiple peak prep business reviews, but that was more of a—less of a business review and more of a peak preparation. But minimum [of] three times for all brands. It’s important.

How Christine and her team ramped up shipping in one afternoon

Rachel Andrea Go: Amazing, thank you. So, you mentioned so many client stories. Can you tell me what is your most memorable experience solving a brand’s logistics or fulfillment problem?

Christine Warren: So, I am—“yes” is my answer, because I love telling stories. But I’m going to be very vague. You can try to guess, but I’m not going to use any brand names. I had a very large brand in my portfolio that sold candles and they decided, wonderfully so — we were all very excited about it — to have a candle day. So — I’m going to use fake numbers — so, every day, I would ship—my team would ship 10,000 candles a day. And they came to us and said, “Hey, we think this is really successful. This is going to be very successful at this price point. We’re going to sell a million and we want you to go from shipping 10,000 to 1 million, and we want you to ship them within three days.” And we, of course, are like—that is a crazy ask, just for the record, so everybody should be aware that is kind of a crazy ask. But our immediate reaction was, “That’s impossible,” right? “How are we going to do this?”

So, we couldn’t go to the corporate office with no ideas, so we came up with a couple ideas [that were] super costly, long tail of shipping, you know, things that clearly were not going to be acceptable for the client experience that they wanted to have. So, we walked into this big conference room; there’s 20 people there, all engineers on both sides. We present what we’ve decided was good or decent. The COO was a hard no to that. The engineers, going back and forth, were saying, “This is—we can’t necessarily do this in that time frame and the cost expectations.” They were saying, “You really need to. We think it’s possible for these reasons.” It gets a little bit heated, right? It’s kind of aggressive conversation.

And the COO stopped us — and this is, like, the best, and I use this all the time now. He stopped us and said, “When does your flight take off?” And it was roughly two hour—we had two more hours we could stay. He said, “I need you, myself, one other person, and two people from the other team, the four of you, to go into a room and solve this in two hours.” And he was dead serious, right? Eye to eye, “I need you to solve this in two hours.” So, we did. So, we went into a room. We started with the premise — which is what is super helpful — that anything is possible. So, if you had no restrictions on cost, on time on technology, what would you do? And we came up with a list of 15 things, five of which were super silly [and] included, like, carrier pigeons and things, but the other 10 were reasonable to talk about.

Bottom line is, two hours — we come out with three ideas that we thought collectively we could do. And then we presented that to the COO and a couple other people — most of the people had left at that point — and agreed to vet them out. And what that resulted in was very successfully not only shipping that million but growing every single year to 3X that amount, which was amazing.

So, basically, it was—when we walked in, it was impossible for us to do that in this current facility, right? So, what we started doing was creating pop-up locations. So, we would create virtual locations, you know, all over, depending on where their customer base was primarily. And we would take the number of customers, we would take historic data and move the inventory, primarily the fast movers in terms of sense, and put them in strategic locations. So, that was probably the biggest thing that we did. We also—there were also concerns around breakage, so we designed a sleeve to put the candles in and some other nuances to it, but that was the number-one solution.

Understand your strengths and weaknesses and keep an eye on industry changes

Rachel Andrea Go: What is going to get harder logistics-wise as time goes on for 3PLs and for brands?

Christine Warren: Yeah, so, right now, it’s the lack of predictability, right? The rules are changing. They’re changing quickly. Who knows what next week will look like, particularly around—a lot of brands—I’ve had a lot of friends of brands reach out to me about the 321 crossborder shipping, right? So, they’ve invested over the years in shipping out of Mexico and/or Canada and very quickly had to pivot and move back into the United States. So, really being agile enough and having relationships with 3PLs and organizations that can support you through any major changes that we expect.

I also expect consolidation as we go through this next couple years; smaller 3PLs merging or merging with larger 3PLs. And then, in terms of “easier,” I mean, having done this for 20 years, I don’t really know that anything gets easier. I do think the good news is that 3PLs grow, brands grow, they get smarter and more knowledgeable, so at least there will be a perception that things are easier.

Rachel Andrea Go: So, what is your advice for 3PLs that want to become an irreplaceable partner for their top brands?

Christine Warren: Yeah, so, “irreplaceable” is impossible, right? And knowing that every day is important. But, you know, identifying what makes your brand want to stay. So, I kind of look at this the flip way. So, what are the reasons why brands leave? 3PLs are not meeting or exceeding expectations — bottom line, that’s the most important thing. An ability to grow, right? So, can you help your brand as they grow to the next stage? I’ve worked with—I also taught entrepreneurship at the—a seminar at the Wharton School for years, and there is a theory that there are resources that are really good for startups, and those same resources, even internal resources, aren’t necessarily the same ones that help them grow. So, really being that 3PL that can help them grow. And then trust and likability, right? Likeability is underrated. People understand mistakes made by people they like and trust a lot more than they will from people that they don’t like or trust.

Rachel Andrea Go: Yeah, amazing advice. What’s your parting advice for brands who are looking for either a 3PL to grow into or are unhappy with their current 3PL?

Christine Warren: Yeah, I think it’s just really important to understand the business, right? What does a 3PL provide? Make sure that your expectations are realistic. Talk to people that you know, right? I’m not a firm believer—I believe, you know, in old-school metrics more than reviews online, right? I’ve seen reviews get manipulated. I’ve seen a lot of things get manipulated online, both positive and negative. So, talking to people that you trust when you make those decisions, and meeting with people face-to-face and getting to know them and seeing their facilities and understanding their processes is really important.