Case Study · Freak Athlete
Truly an end-to-end search.
Freak Athlete makes heavy, oversized fitness equipment, closer to freight than parcel. We ran their fulfillment search end to end: EU, AU, and UK lanes evaluated in parallel under one structured six-week engagement.
Benji Stark Elster, Founder and CEO of Freak Athlete, on the full engagement
The problem
Products that ship like freight, in three regions at once.
Freak Athlete is a D2C fitness equipment company. The flagship products are heavy, oversized, and dimensionally awkward: kettlebells, adjustable weight stacks, stability benches. The handling profile 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.
The work
Where the value actually came from.
The expected value of a search is the longlist: warehouses that fulfill products like yours, in your regions, 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 clients shipping comparable SKUs, rate analysis on their real order data, software demos. In later stages the same posture applied to negotiation, back and forth on which terms to push and which to concede.
The outcome
A placement in EU, and a process that stayed in motion.
The six-week EU search closed with a placement. AU and UK 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 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.
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