Case Study
Truly an end-to-end search.
A D2C fitness equipment brand bringing on fulfillment across three regions. We ran the search end to end: EU, AU, and UK lanes evaluated in parallel under a single engagement.
Context
Who Freak Athlete is, and what the engagement covered.
Freak Athlete is a D2C fitness equipment company. Their flagship products are heavy, oversized, and dimensionally awkward: kettlebells, adjustable weight stacks, stability benches. The handling profile is closer to freight than to standard parcel, which narrows the field of 3PLs who can fulfill them well.
The engagement was a multi-region search: a fulfillment partner for Europe, plus parallel evaluation of options in Australia and the UK, all scoped under one structured six-week process.
In Benji's words
The full conversation.
Benji walked through the whole engagement on camera: how the search was scoped, where the actual value came from, and how he would describe Iron Margin to another founder.
The work
Where the value actually came from.
The expected value of a 3PL search is the longlist: a list of warehouses that fulfill products like yours, in the regions you ship to, at a size that can take you on. We delivered that. But Benji called out something different as the real value:
Most of the value came from Keyan being directly involved in the vetting process. Getting on calls to actually see the warehouses, doing his own search to understand their existing clients, seeing if they currently fulfill with similar items.
For Freak Athlete that meant deep evaluation on every shortlist 3PL: live FaceTime warehouse tours, reference calls to existing clients shipping comparable SKUs, rate analysis applied to their actual order data, software demos. Once we got into later stages, the same posture applied to negotiation. Going back and forth multiple times. Talking through the strategy of which terms to push on and which to concede.
Outcome
A placement in EU, and a process that stayed in motion.
The six-week EU search closed with a placement. The AU and UK lanes were evaluated in parallel under the same engagement, so all three regions were assessed against the same data, the same rubric, and the same timeline.
What made this different from a typical lead-generation referral: the engagement was scoped end to end, and we stayed in it through implementation. Vetting, negotiation, and post-placement check-ins were all part of the same engagement, not a hand-off after the recommendation landed.
Talk to us about your 3PL search.
Start with a 30-minute intro call. We learn your setup, prepare a complimentary shipping evaluation, and walk you through the search structure.
30-minute intro call. No commitment. Get Your Free Evaluation