You’re running a growing DTC brand in 2025. Product costs are up. Shipping rates keep climbing. Customer acquisition costs seem to rise every quarter. Everything costs more, but your customers still expect fast, inexpensive shipping and perfect order accuracy.
Meanwhile, you’re spending 20+ hours a week dealing with fulfillment issues instead of growing your business. Inventory runs out at the worst possible times. Customer service is flooded with “Where is my order?” tickets. Your warehouse team is constantly putting out fires instead of planning ahead.
Sound familiar?
Here’s what we’ve learned from working with hundreds of scaling DTC brands:
If your operations lead isn’t sitting at your strategic planning meetings, you’re setting yourself up for expensive problems that could have been prevented.
The Real Cost of Reactive Operations
Most growing DTC brands treat fulfillment as something that happens after all the important decisions are made. Marketing plans the next campaign launch. Product development sets the timeline. Sales forecast the numbers. Then operations is told to “make it work” with whatever resources are left.
This approach works when you’re doing hundreds of orders a week. It breaks down catastrophically when you’re scaling to thousands.
Here’s what reactive operations actually costs you:
Cash Flow Disasters: You order too much inventory because no one connected sales forecasts to fulfillment data. Now you’ve got hundreds of thousands worth of product sitting in a warehouse collecting dust.
Customer Experience Failures: A viral social media campaign drives 10x normal order volume, but nobody prepared the fulfillment team. Orders that normally ship same-day are taking 1+ week to ship. Your brand reputation takes a hit just when momentum should be building.
Hidden Operational Costs: You’re paying rush fees and overnight shipping charges because everything is a last-minute emergency. These “one-time” expenses become monthly line items.
Founder Time Drain: You’re fielding customer service emails about late shipments instead of focusing on product development, marketing strategy, or fundraising conversations.
What Changes When Operations Has a Voice
Contrast that with brands that bring operations into strategic planning from the beginning:
Proactive Inventory Planning: Your operations team knows about the Black Friday campaign three months ahead. They’ve already negotiated additional warehouse capacity, adjusted inventory forecasts, and coordinated with suppliers. When orders spike, fulfillment stays smooth.
Realistic Growth Planning: Before launching in a new market, operations has already mapped out fulfillment costs, delivery timeframes, and capacity requirements. You can accurately forecast unit economics and avoid geographic expansion disasters.
Cost Optimization: Your operations lead identifies that 40% of shipping costs come from oversized packaging on your bestselling item. A simple packaging change saves $4 per order – which adds up to tens of thousands in monthly savings at scale.
Customer Experience Wins: Operations suggests adding Saturday delivery in key markets. Customer satisfaction scores jump, and the improved experience drives repeat purchases that more than offset any potential extra costs.
The Three Operational Blind Spots That Kill Growth
Working with scaling DTC brands, we see the same three blind spots repeatedly cause expensive problems:
1. The Inventory Cash Flow Trap
Growing brands often treat inventory like marketing spend – more must be better. But without operational input on demand patterns, seasonality, and fulfillment velocity, you end up with costly mistakes:
- Ordering based on optimistic sales projections instead of realistic fulfillment capacity
- Stocking slow-moving variants because they seem strategically important, not because they actually sell
- Missing the connection between inventory levels and shipping speeds (customers abandon carts when delivery estimates exceed 5-7 days)
What operational planning prevents: Dead inventory that ties up cash flow, stockouts during peak selling periods, and storage costs for products that don’t move.
2. The “Figure It Out Later” Scaling Approach
Fast-growing brands often delay operational decisions until problems force immediate action. This creates expensive crisis management cycles:
- Scrambling for warehouse space during Q4 instead of securing it in Q2
- Paying premium rates for expedited shipping when standard shipping would have worked with better planning
- Hiring temporary staff at peak prices instead of training permanent team members during slower periods
What operational foresight enables: Smooth scaling that maintains service levels while controlling costs, even during rapid growth periods.
3. The Customer Experience Disconnect
Many brands don’t realize how much fulfillment impacts customer perception and retention. Operations teams see patterns that marketing and product teams miss:
- Which products have higher return rates due to sizing or quality issues
- How shipping speed affects repeat purchase rates in different customer segments
- When packaging improvements could drive social sharing and organic growth
What operational insights unlock: Customer experience improvements that drive retention and reduce acquisition costs.
Real Brand Examples: Operations as Growth Driver
Carpe’s Canadian Expansion: Instead of treating Canadian fulfillment as an afterthought, Carpe brought operations into their international expansion planning. The result: seamless cross-border fulfillment that delivered over 100,000 units across Canada with full visibility and carbon-neutral delivery options. Their operations-first approach enabled rapid market expansion without compromising customer experience.
Solgaard’s Cross-Border Success: When Solgaard planned their US expansion, operations played a central role in the strategy. They achieved 5-day delivery from Canada to US customers – a competitive advantage that enabled market penetration. The operational excellence became a sales differentiator.
Skincare Brand’s Cost Control: By including operations in strategic planning, this brand reduced shipping costs by 37% while fulfilling 3.3 million units. The operations team identified cost-saving opportunities that marketing and finance had missed, directly improving unit economics.
The Operations Integration Playbook
Ready to bring operations into strategic planning? Here’s how successful brands make the transition:
Start with Shared Metrics
Instead of operations reporting warehouse efficiency while marketing tracks CAC and finance watches margins, create shared KPIs that connect operational performance to business outcomes:
- Customer Lifetime Value by fulfillment speed: How does 1-day vs 3-day shipping affect repeat purchase rates?
- True cost per order: Including all fulfillment, packaging, and shipping costs to understand real unit economics
- Inventory velocity by channel: Which products move fastest through which sales channels, and why?
Include Operations in Planning Meetings
Your operations lead should be part of conversations about:
- New product launches (packaging requirements, storage needs, complexity factors)
- Marketing campaigns (expected volume spikes, geographic targeting, timing coordination)
- Channel expansion (fulfillment requirements for new sales platforms or retail partnerships)
- Seasonal planning (capacity needs, inventory levels, staffing requirements)
Invest in Operational Visibility
You can’t make good decisions without good data. Successful brands invest in:
- Real-time inventory tracking across all locations and channels
- Fulfillment performance analytics that connect to customer satisfaction metrics
- Cost visibility that shows true fulfillment costs per order, customer segment, and product line
- Predictive insights that help anticipate capacity needs and identify potential problems
When to Partner vs. Build Internal Operations
Many scaling brands wrestle with whether to build internal fulfillment capabilities or partner with a strategic fulfillment provider. The decision often comes down to focus and expertise:
Build Internal When:
- You’re launching your product and are able to fulfill all orders from your home
- You have unique operational requirements that standard providers can’t support
- You have the capital and leadership bandwidth to build operational expertise
Partner When:
- You want to focus leadership attention on core business growth rather than operational complexity
- You need access to advanced fulfillment technology and analytics without building it internally
- You want operational scalability without the fixed costs and complexity of internal infrastructure
At GoBolt, we work with brands that choose the partnership route. Our clients treat us as an extension of their operations team rather than just a vendor. We participate in their strategic planning, provide operational insights that drive business decisions, and scale our capabilities as their business grows.
For example, Cakeworthy found that our Shopify integration required “little to no technical effort,” allowing them to focus on growth rather than operational complexity. Swytch Bike’s Chief Manufacturing Officer noted that our LA warehouse “can push through more orders than any other provider,” enabling them to “handle the chaos of launching a new product with tight timelines.”
Making the Transition
If you recognize your brand in these scenarios, here are the immediate steps to take:
This Week: Include your operations lead (whether internal or external) in your next strategic planning meeting. Ask them to present not just operational metrics, but insights about how fulfillment performance connects to customer behavior and business outcomes.
This Month: Audit your decision-making processes. Are operational considerations part of product launches, marketing campaigns, and growth planning? Or do operations only get involved after strategic decisions are finalized?
This Quarter: Invest in operational visibility and analytics. Whether through internal systems or strategic fulfillment partnerships, ensure you have real-time data about inventory, fulfillment performance, and true cost per order.
The brands that scale successfully from $1M to $10M and beyond don’t just have better products or marketing – they have operations that enable growth rather than constrain it. They recognize that in today’s competitive DTC landscape, operational excellence isn’t just a cost center to manage – it’s a strategic capability that drives customer satisfaction, controls unit economics, and enables sustainable growth.
The question isn’t whether you’ll eventually need to upgrade your operational approach. The question is whether you’ll make that transition proactively, as a growth enabler, or reactively, when problems force your hand.
Ready to bring operations into your strategic planning?
Let’s explore how operational partnership can accelerate your growth while freeing up leadership focus for what matters most to your brand. Contact us today.
