Where Does the Stock Actually Go? 3PL vs Your Own Space
By The Velocity Wear Team
The unglamorous question that decides more about a first year than most brand decisions: when the boxes arrive, where do they go, and who puts them in envelopes. There are two answers and the right one depends on volume, on what your time is worth, and on whether your building has a door a pallet fits through.
The case for doing it yourself
At low volume, self-fulfilment is cheaper and better. Cheaper because you are not paying per-pick fees on twelve orders a day, and better because you see every garment before it leaves. Brands that pack their own first hundred orders catch defects, learn which sizes actually move, and get a feel for their product that a fulfilment report does not convey.
It is also the version where you can put a handwritten note in the box, which sounds twee and demonstrably works at small scale, because at small scale you are not competing on logistics.
The case against, which arrives suddenly
Self-fulfilment scales badly and non-linearly. Twelve orders a day is an hour. Sixty is your whole morning, every morning, including the mornings you needed to be doing something else. And it fails exactly when things go well — a drop that sells out is also a drop that generates a week of packing at the moment you should be capitalising on the attention.
The other failure mode is physical. Freight to a residential address is a genuine problem: many carriers will not deliver a pallet without a dock or a lift gate arrangement, and the ones that do charge for it. If you are importing directly, confirm how the goods will physically arrive before the shipment is booked, not after.
What a 3PL actually costs
- Receiving, usually per pallet or per carton, charged once when your stock arrives.
- Storage, per pallet or per bin per month. This is the fee that punishes slow-moving inventory, which is a useful discipline as well as a cost.
- Pick and pack, per order plus per additional item. The base fee is why very low volume is uneconomic there.
- Shipping, which they buy at better rates than you do — often enough to offset a meaningful part of the other fees.
- Setup and integration, which is usually one-off and sometimes waived.
Run those against your actual order volume rather than against a hypothetical one. The crossover point is a real number for your business and it is worth calculating once rather than agonising over repeatedly.
The hybrid most brands land on
Hold your bulk somewhere it can be received properly, keep a working quantity at hand, and fulfil yourself until the volume argues otherwise. Some brands do this with a 3PL holding bulk and shipping wholesale orders while they handle DTC from home; some do it with a self-storage unit and a car.
Either way, the ordering decision is connected. Smaller, more frequent runs mean less stock to house at any moment, which makes the self-fulfilment window last considerably longer. Our 20-piece minimum per design exists partly for this reason — a brand should not be forced into a warehouse decision by a supplier's minimum before it is forced into one by its own sales.
Two things to sort before your first shipment
One: confirm the delivery address can physically receive what is coming, and tell your supplier if it is residential so the freight is booked appropriately. Two: know your carton count and rough dimensions in advance, so "it arrives" is a plan rather than a surprise involving your neighbours.
