Fulfillment was capping growth. We nearly halved the per-order cost.

Pepper Pong is a fast-growing DTC brand and an existing Iron Margin client. A new marketing lead, Phil Vilk of the agency Creative Launch, came in to rebuild the team and scale paid media. The moment spend started ramping, fulfillment became the constraint.

“After the first week I started scaling and hit a wall almost immediately. Shipping and fulfillment costs were eating each order. At that cost my MER and CPA targets weren't realistic.”

Rather than let fulfillment cap the growth plan, he handed the whole problem to Iron Margin and kept his own focus on marketing.

The expected deliverable is a shortlist. We delivered that: four 3PLs run through a real evaluation, not a directory listing. But the two things that moved the number were the negotiation and the transfer.

On price, we didn't negotiate against today's volume, we negotiated against where Pepper Pong was heading. Using the brand's growth projections as leverage, we brought the per-order cost down and chose a partner whose economics improve as volume climbs.

The harder part was the move. When a brand leaves its 3PL, the inventory transfer is where things break: stock in limbo, split shipments, orders that can't ship. We ran the exit, the timeline, and the transfer into a two-warehouse setup so the brand kept shipping through the switch.

“He was able to nearly cut our per-order cost in half. That's real money back on every order.”

That difference went straight back into the growth plan: marketing as a percentage of revenue could climb, and efficiency held because the savings came back on the backend.

The second win was capacity. Because the new partner was chosen to scale with the brand rather than cap it, marketing has never had to pull back because fulfillment couldn't keep up. When the new 3PL sent its first onboarding message, founder Tom Filippini's read was immediate: it seemed even clearer they'd made the right choice.