A first merchandise line, from sourcing to fulfilment

A physical product, and nobody holding the date

A brand with a strong audience wanted to add merchandise, partly for revenue and partly because people kept asking. They’d never made a physical product before, and physical products fail differently from digital ones. Mistakes are expensive, slow to fix and end up in customers’ hands.

There was no sourcing process, no vendor relationships and no one with product operations experience. Ownership was scattered across design, marketing, fulfilment and leadership. Without a QA step, any quality problem would only surface after the inventory had been paid for. The brief was the whole thing, from sourcing through to fulfilment.

What we did

The real risk wasn’t sourcing. It was the scattered ownership. A merchandise launch has a dozen dependencies across teams that don’t normally ship things together, and the default failure is that everyone assumes someone else is holding the date. So we held it.

Ownership. A roadmap with a named owner against every milestone, and the date sat with us. We ran the coordination between internal teams and external vendors all the way through to go-live.

Sourcing and quality. We vetted domestic and international vendors on a scorecard of cost, minimum order quantity, lead time and quality, then negotiated supply agreements whose pricing held as volume grew rather than locking in first-order economics. Nothing went to production volume until prototypes had been tested and suppliers reviewed against written QA standards for packaging, labelling and inventory control.

Fulfilment and launch. We integrated the e-commerce platform with the third-party logistics partner so orders, inventory and tracking moved without anyone touching a spreadsheet. Go-live was sequenced with the digital campaign and the product drop, so the store and the marketing landed on the same day.

Rebuilt artifact

Before

After

1. Ownership in fragmentsNamed owner per milestone
2. No sourcing processVendor scorecard vetting
3. No QA processWritten QA standards
4. No vendor relationships3PL integration
5. Launch date held by nobodySequenced go-live

Where it landed

• Launched on schedule and within budget.
• 20% under the first sourcing quotes through vendor negotiation.
• The vendor scorecard, supply agreements and QA standards stayed with the brand for the next run.