Name: Inside Rue Gilt: The Hot Seat + Premium Brand Giveaway
Uploaded: 2026-06-03T19:30:09.263Z
Duration: 54 min 24 s
Description: Inside Rue Gilt: The Hot Seat + Premium Brand Giveaway

Transcript for "Inside Rue Gilt: The Hot Seat + Premium Brand Giveaway": and I will be your all host today. Joe, let me move it over to you. Sure. Hey. My name is Joe Fari. I'm the director of transportation here at RuinGill. Been here for about three years. I spent all of my most of my career running that Columbus, Ohio gamut of retailers, Abercrombie, Victoria's Secret, DSW, Burton Snowboards. I've been either in DC operations or transportation at all of us. So happy. to be great level of experience we've got with us. today. Yep. Let's go ahead and have you introduce yourself. Hi. My name is Jeff Faulkner. I'm the senior director for the enterprise solutions team. I've been here at Regalte Group for about eight years. Prior to this role, I was on our product team, where we focus mostly on, middle tier applications specifically around OMS. Awesome. Awesome. And, again, just more experience that we're bringing to the to the webinar here. We're we're gonna jump into our into our next one, and we're gonna start off with a poll. We wanna we wanna talk about, partial shipping and route route gilt, especially volume swings and the types of products that you're shipping. And but we're gonna start with Joe. We'd like to see from our audience, how do you what's your shipping philosophy? How do you describe the way you're doing it? Are you a cost primary driver? You're looking at how the customer experience is handled? Are you trying to balance that cost and customer experience as equally as possible? Or maybe you're still discovering that. You're you're in the in a transition, from one to the other. So let's give it another few seconds here, and it does look like, the balance is the goal. And with that, Joe, let me let me kick it over you because balance isn't exactly your last goal. You guys have a very clear driver. Can you, bring us into that? Yeah. Sure. So, you know, like you said, Justin, a lot of people used to think of it as going fast or being inexpensive. Really hitting that balance is important. But for us, we we pivot, oftentimes. So for those who don't know what Root Guild is, we're essentially the TJ Maxx of the online world, meaning that we sell off price merchandise at lower cost for members. With low cost comes lower margins, and so cost is paramount for us most of the time. However, we will not let it degrade the member experience. So while we're the TJ Maxx of the online world, we also go I call it, higher into the skews, a lab grown diamond bracelet, for example, Gucci bag, which you didn't put on the pole, I bet that would have won, a Gucci bag, or, Ferragamo shoes. Just high dollar expensive, items. So at some point, cost structure breaks down for us where we're not willing to take the risk to save the dollar because we can lose the member forever. For us, a really good example of that is last year, a few days before Thanksgiving, we started noticing USPS shipments were getting not scanned into their network for several days at a time. Low UPS is one of our lowest cost providers. We like them. We have great relationship with them, but they were having a failure locally here. At that point, we made the business decision as transportation, as business as a whole, to shut the post office off for the rest of peak. Four days of them doing no label scans exposed us to roughly half $1,000,000 in expense between customer calls, replacement orders, lost shipping costs. And so if we let that compound to our busiest time of the year, we really would have been damaged. So kind of to frame it up is cost is our driver because we have, we're a low margin business. We gotta I'm I'm one of the biggest line items in the p and l, and my goal in life is to make that p and l smaller. But not at the point where we'll lose a customer. Right? If you don't get your Gucci bag, you can buy it from somewhere else. We're not selling anything unique here. We're not like Abercrombie or someone that owns their own brand where you can you can never go anywhere else if you want that shirt. You could go somewhere else. If we lose that trust with the member, we will potentially lose that person forever. So at the end of the day, our strategy is not just like this abstract, faster, slower balance. It's really tactical where cost leads at the front most of the year, and then we protect the customer with our our tactics throughout the year to protect as much cost as we can but not lose a member. Yeah. So so it sounds like it's not so much about your guaranteeing next day delivery. You're not saying, okay. Look. You buy it from us, and you'll have it tomorrow. Instead, it's whatever promise you make, you need to deliver that promise. So if it is a three day promise, whatever it takes to get that three day promise is is what's really necessary. And. I think it's really important to emphasize that, there is still a balance there between the the cost and the customer trust, and it does sound like you guys keep that as well. So, let's take this a step further and and bring in bring it inside the four walls because you define strategy, and now you have you have to execute it. So, Jeff, before we before we kick over to you, let's let's do a quick poll as to whether where our audience is in their automation journey. So with with that, we're we're basically asking how automated is your fulfillment process. Are you highly automated as a as a company? Are you partially automated? A little bit of manual, a little bit of, of, automation. But you're currently evaluating, automation options, or it doesn't apply to you. You just you'd like the manual solution that you've got, and that works out well for you. As we're, seeing these, these votes come in, it looks like, partial automation seems to rule the day, followed up shortly by people evaluating more automation options. And I think, I think that kinda makes sense, nowadays with where the labor costs have gone in the last decade. It really is a it really is something where it's very hard to be non automated. And, so as as we go forward, Jeff, this this one's gonna go towards you. How does automation look like at RootGuilt? I I know we were just there yesterday, but still, how does it look like for the rest of us? Well, you weren't here yesterday, but, yeah, the whole team was here yesterday. So, yeah, obviously, automation is on everyone's mind. For you know, you know, as Joe mentioned, getting orders out the door as quick as possible, but doing it in a cost effective way is extremely important to us. For us, it's about selecting the right automation that meets our needs and meets our business. So here in our Kentucky facility, we have, really three pieces of automation. First and probably, I would say the coolest, which is our spark, CVP auto boxer. I know, Justin, you've seen that before. That seems to be the one that everyone likes the most, where we process mostly singles. Ideally, we use it for shoes, sunglasses, and our garment on hangers. Second and and really the most recent purchase were two tension auto baggers. So we have one for root and we have one for guilt. And we mostly process singles through those, you know, single line, items, mostly flat pack. And then, Mhmm. our third And that's all in branded packaging, though. Right? That's why there's one for each. Right? that's correct. Yeah. Each one, we're having some conversations around whether or not we wanna switch that up, but, for now, yes, it's Brandon. So an operator will scan an item. It'll light up which machine that item should go to based on the brand. And then our third, piece of automation is a robotic put wall from Berkshire Grey. We use that to sort our multiline orders. We do not use that for any of the garment on hangers or any large items just because of the cubby size. And, like several people on the poll here, we do have about 60 plus pack stations that can handle, both multiline, you know, multiline and single line orders. So it seems like there's a there's a lot of variation inside your warehouse. Does automation are you using it for for everything or, you know, what about, like, high value footwear? We we tip it we don't run the, the footwear through the bag machine. There's some limitations to the bag machine just because of how it's set up. So those are packed out manually through, we don't put any high value items or high value shoes in bags. We put them in in boxes. But we do process some shoes through, you know, in bags but through the manual backstations. Yeah. I do remember when I was there a year or so ago. It was, just, you don't think about it as somebody that, helps ship a lot of different things. That the shoes can be in a box, you know, relatively small all the way up to boots, which can exceed a lot of the carriers, dimensional requirements. So, yeah, operational complexity with enormous variations in size, multiline orders, though automation may exist to solve specific problems like, you mentioned the Spark CDP, which does a great job for single line orders and maybe, maybe if you've got goods that stack well on on one another, it's that that's great for that, but it won't solve everything. And this is where many, operations fail. They try to force everything in automation rather than designing automation around particular types of business or particular, problems. I wanna move on to the the next section, and and honestly, this is where most companies struggle, which is how to how to balance cost, risk, and reliability. Joe, coming back to you here, how do you think about that balance between cost, risk, and reliability? Yeah. That's that's the fun part of this job. Right? So we cost a good way to cost out of network, everybody knows, is to try to find regional providers or small providers that aren't that national footprint, UPS, FedEx, USPS in some cases. But for us, we can never lose that relationship with our national who happens to be FedEx. We have a diverse network. We have hundreds of dropshippers. FedEx does a really nice job with our returns. Splitting that across several carriers would break the operation a little bit. And, you you know, they they generally do a good job on the express side. So I I think us and other major retailers will never really drop that reliance on a national carrier at some point, but there are places where the regionals can succeed. Right? So we we have to get creative about moving volume away from the national where it makes sense and keeping in the national where it makes sense and finding creative ways to do that. And, we talked about earlier, Justin. Driving cost is my North Star most of the time. And so it doesn't always seem rational to keep a FedEx agreement out of this building and shipping somewhere, if I could get cost savings with OnTrack or another regional. Well, the as example of us and how we've been able to maintain that reliability and save cost is we zone skip. And some other operators on here might know, okay. Zone skip here in Kentucky. You're definitely zone skip into California. Well, for us, it actually made most sense from a density perspective to zone skip into New York. Our zone five packages turn into zone two or three packages, and we save a dollar ish on the parcel side, and I spend 50¢ to get it there. So net net, I save 50¢ a package, which is a good cost per package savings, but I don't degrade my relationship with my national carrier because I'm zone skipping into their facility on the East Coast. So it's a creative way of getting cost out without doing the easy button, which is, okay. I'll give this much more volume to a carrier that has lower rates. But then you go back and you start hurting your national relationship. So that that's been a really successful, solution for us. But we also make some intentional decisions as a business, which I find interesting. I've just never done this before. If you're a a high volume purchaser, if you go to our website and buy things twice a day and your order comes in, we've identified you as that, and we will hold on to your order till the end of the day because you might make another one. So we'll turn those two orders into one, turn four boxes into two, whatever the math math, and we'll save money that way. But it forces us to be very clear out about how fast our network is. So we intentionally slowed it in on the click to ship side of the business. We have to make sure, back to our original point, that we still can keep our promise within our network even though we go backwards one day on the click to ship part of the customer experience. That that's where we have to make sure that we have the right network in place that's reliable enough so we can slow it down where it needs to go slow on the front end and make the final delivery on time in full so the customer is still happy and was none the wiser that we held on to their order. So for us, balance is not just, like, cost for service. We have to manage cost, risk, reliability, and commercial terms, to make sure we're doing all of the right things to protect the network and protect our relationships with all those carriers. If I spread myself too thin, everybody's like, oh, here comes this guy again with his 200 packages a day. I'm not giving you I I have to I have to give everybody something or we become a very small fish in a big pond as opposed to a medium sized fish in a few ponds. That's a that's an interesting operational take. And and as we switch over more towards the technical take, Jeff, what's your thoughts on on that cost risk and reliability balancing act that we all have to do? Yeah. I mean, as Joe said, I mean, we're we're constantly looking to save money, but also to meet or exceed expectations for our members. You know, while we're always thinking about the savings part of it, again, as Joe said earlier, we do not wanna disappoint customers. That's a balancing act that we have to play every day. A disappointed customer will move on. They they don't get their package in time. There are other retailers out there and they will not come back. So it is a it is a game that we play daily, to ensure that we meet, those expectations and don't disappoint customers. I think we know we can push the limits on some of our processes, you know, to maybe squeeze a little bit of extra cost out of it, but we have to make that decision. Does it come at the, you know, does it come does it impact the customer? And we make those decisions pretty frequently. My team, Joe's team, the operations team, we get together on a, you know, weekly basis or multiple times a week to talk through some of these decisions, to make sure that we're making the right decisions for the customer. So, you know, we we are always in lockstep, always aligned, and always keeping those customers, in the costs, you know, in in our decision making. I. think I'm sorry. It's not scripted. That's part of the what's unique here is I've never been this lockstep with my tech team. Yep. And it's paid dividends. Right? Usually, it's an email, set up a meeting two days down the line. Everybody gets a room. You have to explain to them transportation. They have to explain to you technology. We're we're very physically close right now, but we're very close on a work on a day to day work basis that Jeff's team understands transportation better than any tech team I've ever worked with. And I have enough knowledge to be dangerous on the tech side, and I I think that's just that's the real value of having those relationships even internally. Yeah. I think over the course, especially over the course of the last couple years, during peak, we're trying new things. Right? We're we're you know, when Joe came on, he had some he had some ideas to try out and, you know, this is new to us too. So we're we're just learning as we go. Yeah. And that think that some of this comes down to it, key. and then and I'm gonna go back to, you know, the fact that our team was on-site just yesterday that, you know, I. was physically on-site with you guys, you know, whatever many months ago it was. And we didn't just sit in a conference room. Right? We walked the floor. We we went out and and had the the the three slash four way conversation, between us as the vendor, the IT staff there, the the operations staff, and the business staff, which all have different needs and limitations. And, sitting out there on the floor, sometimes having to find a little bit quieter place, but, sitting out there on the floor and and asking the questions and and actually hearing some feedback from the operators informed, I think, all of the the the decision making parties as to what we need to do. And and, I think that that, that really changes the way the solution is deployed because as a vendor, I feel really happy to be out there and and not only hear from the IT folks with the with the business limitations or with the with the technical limitations, with the tech stack that is well, let's face it, has a weight and a and a direction of its own along with the operations folks that well, they have a a direction and a North Star they've been pushing at for months, if not years. Bringing all that together really does make us able to, provide a better solution in the long run, because we are tweaking what we're doing to the to the physical, sometimes a very physical and technical realities, that that we have in place, that create the constraints associated with the business outcome, which is, you know, a very high expectation meeting for your customers. I think that's really important. And so it's more than just, you know, I wasn't gonna I got in my notes here to talk about things like carrier rationalization. Right? Joe's talking about, you know, why do I bring certain carriers on board? How do I protect my national carrier relationship? That under slash over diversification and the creative ways you can do about it, I think that's really important. But the same logic applies inside the four walls of your warehouses, not just in between carriers. You know? Do we optimize rates but ignore execution impact? Do we create, things that are are great for the bottom line but create operational pains out there? Or do we do it the other way? And operationally, it's really beautiful, but the tech stack becomes so fragile because of what we've done that, we interrupt operations. So there's just so much that needs to get talked about. It's not just optimization of rates, at the at the, at the cost of all the downstream operational processes that that that occur. So you guys have anything else you wanna add to to this section before we move on? All good. No. I think you you covered it. We'll talk a little bit. more. about the the partnership in a little bit. Alright. Let's, let's move on then because, I think we wanna go to stress test a couple of things here because everything we've talked about work until works until peak hits. Right? Peak is, the ultimate stress test. One last poll before we get going. Audience, what's your biggest challenge when it comes to peak? You know, is it, carrier capacity and reliability, cost management and rate control, especially with the, peak season surcharges nowadays, labor costs, visibility and exception management, or is it speed of execution? Do you just have so many orders that between operations and, well, maybe some limitations of of the way the it's been implemented, you can't keep up with the, with with the with the orders that are available for you. So I think it's a that's a a really, interesting and important question to make sure that we are we are asking, as we go forward. And it looks like carrier capacity and reliability is, is really the number one followed very closely by cost controls. So with that in mind, Joe, when you think about, peak season and disruption and what changes, how do you prepare, especially with a company that where the the experience is number one. Right? Where you guys are are trying to exceed the carriers near 97% accuracy by a significant margin. What what is that, what is that preparation? How do you how do you prep for that? Yeah. So I agree with the polo, actually. So peak for us changes everything. Where I was saying cost is the North Star, and I've said that a few times. We move reliability or customer experience right to the front of the line to the point where we will, cost still matters, but we will make decisions so that we can hit our company goal. And like you kinda alluded to, Justin, ours is aggressive. I worked at retailers before, and I don't think I've seen this high of a goal to have a 99.8% on time delivery by holiday. Widely spouted here at Roo every other day since October that it's the most important time of the year. It's the most important time of the year, and that's how we view it. If you ruin someone's Christmas, they're not coming back. So we have we do a lot of work to make sure that we hit that 99.8% by get it by holiday promise. We've first and the easiest thing to do is we front run, all carrier cutoffs. So if a carrier says your last cut off dates the thirteenth, we're gonna be cut off on that service on the tenth. Will we spend more money because we have to upgrade beyond that? Yeah. We will. But we'll maintain that customer's, trust in us for years to come and hopefully win their business over and over. So we always we build those flex that flexibility into the network ahead of time, I think, is key. In the moment, you know, when I think about peak planning, the old school way to think of it or used to was, like, volume and what carrier is gonna take which volume and make sure they're prepared to take all the volume. And that I call your peak plan. That never works. It's all something always happens, so you should have a flexibility built into your plan. And we spent a an extraordinary amount of time on building that flexibility in early on in the year. So I I won't have time to wait for an IT ticket or, hey. Jeff tells me it's a code blackout. I don't know what that means, but I just know I can't do stuff. So I just can't we can't have those things happen during peak. I need we need to build that flexibility in in the beginning of the year or in the mid part of the year so that you can execute on it when it's time. A good example of that was, like I mentioned earlier, that we had to shut the post office off for peak, and I didn't have to get on a meeting. I just called Jeff. Like, hey. I'll shut them off. He's like, use carrier volume balancing and beside ProShip. Lock them down to one package a day, and they're off. Okay. I was done in five minutes. Right? It was it was great. Not great because I had to shut a carrier off. It was great because I could execute on a plan. So yeah. So for me, peak being successful in peak is make sure you build flexibility on the front end. You'll likely need to use it during peak, but don't try to build your flexibility in November. Like, oh, you know what? I have a great idea. We should we should be able to shut a carrier off or use it, you days use date shopping to make sure certain carriers get cut off on certain days. That needs to be built, tested, and run through before the leaves start changing. Well, if you live in California, you know. But, like, if if in those Midwest people, when the leaves start changing, you should that that should be already built. So that's that's probably our biggest lesson. Peaks not just a time to discover that. It's time to use it. There's always chaos. Like, Tyson, you know, everybody has a plan till you get punched in the face. So. always get punched in the face and peaks. Always have some sort of backup plan or flexibility to make sure your promises happen to your, for your members or your customers in some people's case. Yeah. No. I'll piggyback a little bit on what Joe said. I mean, we prepare so much prior to hitting the actual, you know, actual peak that the day to day is pretty routine. Right? I mean, we've got we've got it pretty nailed down. We've got a great plan for it. We meet like I said, we meet during peak, we're meeting daily. Heading into peak, we're meeting multiple times a week. We have a calendar where Joe is, you know, constantly putting all the things that he needs to change and when. So everybody knows their role as we hit peak. So being prepared as you go into it is, you know, has helped us tremendously to to be prepared. Yeah. And I'm a I hate meetings. I hate meetings I hate meetings for the sake of meetings. But with that daily meeting that I put out there is kind of, like, to me, go working out a muscle. So we might not have a whole lot to discuss on November 1, but we start people start getting that muscle of getting into the cadence of every day. We're gonna meet. We're gonna talk about the plan. So November 1 through the tenth, it's a five minute meeting. Just any questions about the long term scope. But as we get deeper into November and December, it's a really passionate, fun meeting to be in because we're making decisions that day that'll affect the next six days, and we could completely unwind that decision the following day if we found out it didn't work. So it's it's a nice muscle to work in the beginning. It seems like overkill, but I think it it comes out for us as a really great way to build relationships internally and make sure everybody understands what's going on. So we're all singing the same song with leadership as what's going on this week with our get up holiday promise? Yeah. Yeah. You guys you. guys have covered so much that I I I I wanna make sure that our audience heard. Number one, I love that that, that meeting that you guys start before you need the meeting. Right? The fact that that everybody gets to know one another, you know what you get to understand which each department's key triggers are, who to call in for what, what the communication change is gonna be because I'm sure that changes every year, you know, all these things. Second, the testing itself. I am a big fan of what what I refer to as compression testing. Now what the the idea behind that is, hey. Look. Father's Day is about to come up. If you have a a mini peak on Father's Day, it's a mini peak. Treat it like peak. Do everything you would normally do. Make sure that you you've you've trained temporary workers. Make sure that, you know, maybe you hold orders and you don't start processing orders until noon when you would normally start at 10AM or 8AM or something like that. So you have that smaller period, still with plenty of recovery time, but you have that smaller period where you're actually acting like it is, Cyber Monday. It is whatever your busiest day of the year is. So you can actually test and break your systems. The second thing that you mentioned is is controls in the hands of the customer, whether it's operation or IT. That's that's a decision that each company has to make themselves. But the fact that internally, you could say, you know what? I don't wanna use the United States post office, so I'm gonna leverage a feature in the product to turn it all the way down. I'm gonna dial that knob on my own. I don't have to go to my vendor to do that. I think that's a second thing that that, makes that reaction time so much faster. Joe, you mentioned, we'll make a decision on on Monday, and we'll reverse that decision on Tuesday because new data has come. Well, if you're making changes that quickly, if if if the the reality of your experience is happening in a way that you need to be able to throw levers, adjust knobs, and change set points, well, during peak, lots of people have that problem. You don't wanna be dependent upon a third party to be able to make those changes. So it really is about planning tighter, committing earlier, and practicing all of this stuff. And I've seen you guys do some practicing already, so I I love that. So we've covered a lot here. Let's step back for a second and and translate this into action. Jeff, from your perspective, what are the biggest lessons here for transportation, IT and operations leaders trying to do something similar? You guys have spent years building this. What's your recommendation of somebody trying to follow in your footsteps? Yeah. So, I mean, you've heard us touch on it, a few different times, but we really look at, you know, we we really look at our teams as one team. So, we don't look at as tech and operations. We look at it as as one team with shared accountability. As Joe said, we meet several times a week. We talk through, you know, different bottlenecks, different solutions that he's looking for from the transportation side of things, whether or, you know, operations, just to make sure we have total alignment. And this isn't just a internal philosophy. It's it's something that we extend to our external partners as well. You know, Justin, you mentioned we had your team here yesterday. You know, we frequently bring in vendors and and partners that we work with to take a look at our operations to help us, you know, think about ways that we might be able to, you know, brainstorm new opportunities or move the business forward. One example is, the Ship app. So Justin was here, about, oh, I don't know, about eight months or so ago, where we were talking, just brainstorming some ideas. We had, some questions and some, comments about, you know, how can we, rewrite packages at pack stations and do it at a in a cost effective way. We had some vendors that gave us some, proposals that were very, very expensive, very long to implement. And Justin threw out the idea of, hey. What if we tried this ship app? It's a product that we have that we're you know, that is in the market right now for a few different customers. Would you guys like to try it? So out of that meeting came a, you know, a new project that we've been implementing over the course of the last several months. It's, it's been a, you know, a very it's been a great cost saver, to be honest. It's come with its bumps, but, you know, we're working with ProShip on that. And we have a partnership with them where they're actually trying to help us with some usability issues. But, you know, all in all, it's been a fantastic, project to work on with ProShip. And it wouldn't happen if we didn't have that relationship with, you know, not just internal, but external partners as well. So, again, I would say, you know, we're all one team. We can't do it. You know, technology doesn't do it alone. Operations doesn't do it alone. We have to, you know, come together as one team to help solve some problems. Yeah. And, you know, not every customer is a good fit for taking a product in a new direction. That's why it was approached the way it was. That's why we were pretty frank saying that it wouldn't meet all of your needs, but it would be more cost effective than some of your other options out there if you were willing to accept that there will be bumps in that road. And, of course, us coming back out to help us move some of those bumps out in the road is definitely something that, we think is, critical to us being a good vendor with you. And, I I think that, one thing I'd love to pull out here because it came up earlier is is the idea of alignment. Right? You guys have been talking about alignment inside, Rue Guilt. From leadership expectations to operational execution to vendor partnerships. It all just has to connect. And, you know, sometimes you can do that all over video conference and things of that nature, and sometimes you just gotta get that warehouse and walk it together. So I I wanna I wanna sum up a couple of things here. I want to, talk about the fact that, you know, from from Joe's point of view, that top down alignment of the 99.8%, on time expectation. Customer experience starts from leadership and then flows into execution, and then all the way down to us in vendor selection. Right? Seeing operations in person leads to better solution, leads to opportunities. Maybe not every opportunity is a great fit for you, as a as a as a, shipper, but where it is a good fit, not only can it help the vendor expand the product line, but in this case, we can do it at, potentially a a significant cost savings, for for a similar level of functionality. And then the warehouse walk through reveals constraints that that no call ever can. The reality is is is I'm I'm often known for my dumb questions, right, air quotes, out on the floor. Because doing those those, quote, unquote, dumb questions actually allows us to, to understand, to ensure that we're not making assumptions because we have our own language. You know, I've been I've been doing this for twenty six years, and we have some very specific language inside ProShip. And Rue Guilt's been, been around for a long time, and they have their own language. You know, the fact that, both have come from other backgrounds, there's language you bring there. And the only way to ensure that we're all talking the same thing is to ask the quote, unquote, dumb question. And then because of that, we're able to do things like find solutions that may be cheaper and faster than your WMS or your ERP vendor might provide you. And then, hopefully, that helps you lead to great vendor relationships so that you can discover, any blind spots and things of that nature. So, gentlemen, let me throw it back over to you here before we move on to our next slide. Any any other, any other things about the shipping app or any other things that that, we've been working with? And maybe it's not even ProShip, but anything, that you guys wanna talk about for these, for those remaining lessons for that whole, not just software stack, but communication stack, transportation IT operations executives, that we may wanna throw in here. I mean, it I I guess I'll just, you know, I'll just put a point on what you said, Justin. Those, site visits are super helpful. You know, you see things in a different you you go and see a lot of customers. You know, we we're we're here doing things one way. And and just walking the floor with us and, you know, picking up things that we might not pick up because we see them every day is really key. It's helped us in a few different areas. So, you know, another another lesson learned would be to get, you know, to get your vendors to come on-site. Get your vendors to experience the issues and the problems that you're seeing on the floor and every day. It it's true. It it helps, you know, tremendously. Yeah. Yeah. That's I gonna say, if I don't put a label on a package every year, I feel like I'm doing something wrong. yeah. The the ideation session that went on here yesterday with ProShip specifically, I sat in this room, and I didn't understand a lot of what they were JSON, JavaScript, and but, like, there there's all these ideas that came up. Nine out of 10 of them were shot down. Like, oh, that won't work because of this. Oh, yeah. And that going and then that tenth idea happened, and we're like, oh, we can drive that that time down by four seconds or or whatever the weird the problem we were trying to solve. So your dumb question thing, Justin, like, those weren't necessarily dumb, but they were people were stacking their information as they coupled together what they saw and being a big group together. So just having that relationship internally and with your vendors is important because then people are willing to fail in front of you and fail fast. Mhmm. Say, I have an idea, and you're not gonna be like, that's a dumb idea. You just say, well, that won't work because of this, but then they've learned and they can help you. I think that those relationships internally, externally are just super important. Yep. Awesome. Alright. Last question before we open it up for QA. You you both been doing this for a while. You both are experienced in in your industry. You clearly evolved how you approach these problems. If you could go back to your past self and give one piece of advice, what would it be? Joe, let's start with you. So I would say for for me and this might just be personal. For every great idea you have, you you need to be your own skeptic and try to kill that thing twice before you start running down the hall saying I've saved a million dollars. I learned that early on in my career, right, that every you have a people will have a tendency that I have this great idea and they drive their analysis towards the idea as opposed to letting the analysis or whatever it is drive you to the solution. So being your own skeptic and not thinking you're always the smartest person in the room or have the greatest idea that's unable to fail, taking your work and trying to beat it up and kill it until you then take it to somebody to present it to as an opportunity was is something I would have told my younger self to do. Like, slow down, man. Check it. Make sure you're not doing any, self fulfilling prophecies and figuring out, like, things on your own. That that's and then the Avan AI is the same way. Like, AI will tell you that you're the smartest guy. Like, great idea, Joe. And I'm like, well, that's wrong and that's wrong and that's wrong. So it's the same sort of thing you that would apply to myself, which is to make sure you try to be your own critic first. Excellent. And, Jeff, what's your thoughts? Yeah. I would kinda piggyback on what I said earlier, which is to, you know, really invest in these partnerships both internally and externally early on. I think, you know, when my younger self was was, you know, it's just starting off. It was mostly putting your head down and focusing to make sure you get your goals done, getting your team's goals done. But the the longer I've been doing this and, you know, the lot the better we've been working together, it really, it it it makes a lot of sense to have that one team mentality. Break those silos down, make sure that you are all on the same page, that you're you're marching, to the same drum, and, you know, the the successful the successful follow. Excellent. Yeah. No. That that that's, that's great advice. And, of course, in our chat, it seems like, there's there's a a little bit of, rivalry as to which team externally to their companies should be the best team, whether you seem to be in the Chicago land area or the, Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. So, we won't call too much in that whole rivalry there, best in the NFL. But, let's go ahead and and, let's let's open things up to to our QA. As a reminder, you can submit questions. We've got quite a bit of them. If we can't get back to you at this point in time, we will respond. Our team will respond after this, and, my team will, let me know when I when we're gonna do the drawing. But let's go ahead and get started. So the first question is is how how the how much does a sustainable relationship with vendors carriers play when deciding who to work with? So that's how much does a sustainable relationship with vendors slash carriers play when deciding who to work with? Gentlemen. I I mean, I'll jump in. Start. From a tech standpoint, it's it it it it matters a lot. We wanna make sure we're being able we're able to have these open you know, this open mind of communication, be able to be, you know, really, really good partners to bring bring folks in here, that are willing to, you know, to to work with us, very closely on on a number of different issues. We've taught when we're looking at new vendors, we have conversations with some of their existing customers to see how they actually you know, how good they are at that, how good they are at communication, how good they are being, you know, sharing their road maps and so on, and just kind of pressure testing a bit. So in in technology, it's it's very it plays a very big role. Yeah. For me on the you know, especially the carrier side, getting building that good relationship with them and making sure that you understand their business as well as they are trying to understand yours so you can kind of, lead the horse to water and say, here are the packages I think are good for you and what you can provide us. Maybe you want these over here fine, but you have to change your premise a little bit. You know, FedEx famously has said recently, we don't want your T shirts. We sell t shirts. And their and the way they've priced us, the yeah. The the t shirts have gone elsewhere. But I'm giving them what they want and maintain that relationship on our side too and make sure that they're happy and fed while still trying to drive cost down with my other vendors. So not just going lowest cost relationships be damned. You need to kinda manage that relationship and make sure that you're always, you know, protected in a stable network after you've made changes and keeping the same relationships with those carriers and growing new ones. Alright. So moving on to the to the next question, this one's, kinda got some layers in it, so we're probably gonna ask ask or probably gonna get some interesting different answers. There's a wide variety of automation options in the marketplace. Are you looking to more to lower cost on singles and doubles or large CapEx projects with longer ROIs but larger returns in the long run. So how are you guys kinda weighing all these options that you've got? Because there's a ton of them clearly. Yeah. I mean, right to be 100% honest, right now, we are kinda sticking with what we have for automation. We in terms of ROI, when we make big capital investments, the ROI really has to be within twelve to fifteen months. And right now, we we sort of you know, we're we're we're kinda, good with what we have. We're not looking into whether it's robots or another put wall, but essentially really kinda maximizing what we have. So I guess in terms of, like, looking at new automation right now, that's kind of all on hold why we maximize what we have. Excellent. Yeah. And and I I I can see that. So it's one of those things where I know for us, if we can't calculate a a 12 12 ROI for our customers, We rarely recommend something unless they're clearly asking for it. This one, Joe is gonna go to you. When when you zone skip from Ohio to New Jer to New Jersey, how do you set up the shipments so it legitimately shows New Jersey as the origin? Operationally, in the carrier size, what chain of custody that keeps the keeps it compliant? What documentation scans, SLA, language matters most? What are the common implementation pitfalls, billing correction, charges, address, permit issues, loss, acceptance scans, and how do you avoid them? Now I'm I'm actually gonna jump in here first for a second and say that this is what, at ProShip, we refer to as a multi leg shipment. And depending upon how you wanna do this, you may want your shipping software to create one or both of those legs. Generally, you want us to create the last leg. So if we're in if we're pulling into New Jersey, we wanna make sure we've got a label that goes to the final recipient that originates in that New Jersey sort facility. It is up to you whether or not you want us to take into account, the line haul cost associated with it as well as potentially gather the information to create that bill of lading. So that's gonna vary by customer to customer. Joe, if you wanna talk about, some of the other parts of that, I'm sure that the the audience would appreciate it. Yeah. So for us, we had like you mentioned, we had to set up that account with FedEx based on the way we are billed to systemically exist in Keyesby, New Jersey, not Louisville, Kentucky. So that's step one that we had to we had to break a whole new account off. Then step two is working with Jeff's team on here all the ZIP codes I wanna service with the zone skip truck. What then, you know, you run the analysis and see if it's the same. I've covered earlier that it's about a 50¢ per package savings. And I thought that was gonna be the hard part was coming up with the savings and filling up the truck, get a new FedEx account. Little did I know that it was a kind of a legal tumbleweed. To your point about whoever asked the question, to your point about, chain of custody and how we make it work, we work directly with FedEx Brokerage, so that was a nice and neat package for us. So ProShip creates the label, just the FedEx label from Keesby, New Jersey. Our sortation system sees that that's the Keesby account, kicks it down to the Keyesbee door. We have associates in there packing it like Tetris. Right? Because that the more that goes into that truck, the more money I save per package because that's sunk cost. It's going there for x amount of dollars, whether there's one carton on it or 5,000. So using FedEx brokerage, we maintain, liability until it leaves our building for all packages. But we do have a report that ProShip Tel has built to give us the value and the bill of lading for that truckload. And we worked with our insurance company, and we raised our cargo liability with the carrier so we could cover about a million dollars a load. And then our insurance company asked us to provide a certain subset of information which ProShip helped us helped us do. So here's everything that's on that truck. Here's the cost value of everything on that truck. So my boss, if he's even here, we'll see. He loves the statement of, oh, the truck went into the ditch and caught on fire. If that were to happen, are we have increased cargo liability? Right? That because FedEx isn't gonna give us a claim. Increased part of liability, and our insurance comes on top and covers the balance of the load based on us being compliant with their request. So getting the legal part of the zone scale was actually a lot harder than doing the function out it was easy. We created a new account, diverted down the right lane, called FedEx. They picked it up every day. So that that would be the watch out if anybody's going to zone skip or try something like that. Once you put it in a you don't put it directly in a FedEx truck, you put it in a broker's truck for a day, you end up having some weirdness with custody. From an SLA perspective, part of that question, we have noticed that it's actually faster than standard FedEx even though we hold some packages for a whole day. That truck teams from here to New Jersey overnight, so it'll leave, say, It'll leave today at four, and it'll be in New Jersey at six in the morning. And they'll unload it sometime during the day tomorrow. Whereas a regular FedEx truck is indeed gets sorted five times before it hits New York. So there is some wonkiness that I had to cover with customer service. So, hey. You're not gonna see a scan sometimes in forty eight hours. So if your members call, that's that's a why. But click the porch, they'll get it probably faster than if we didn't, so I'll skip it. So it was it was a very simple idea that surprised me with a lot of different breakoffs that I had to solve for that or learning experiences like all the legal chain of custody. Yeah. That's a that's a good call out. It it I always like to use the phrase simple is never easy. So, once you do the work, it becomes simple, but getting there is is often not easy. Alright. So we've got, four minutes and four questions, remains. We may not get to all the questions. Let me keep pushing here. How does ProShip integrate with AI powered route optimization predictive analytics? In what ways can ProShip, shipping data be analyzed, leveraged by AI models? So this is all about where does AI fit in shipment execution. And, I'm gonna quickly, quickly say, it it doesn't fit in creating labels. It doesn't fit in generating costs. It doesn't fit in communicating with the carrier. Where it does fit in the is in the piece of how long it's going to take that particular service to get from the origin to the destination. ProShip is already set up to allow, what we refer to as Ultra TNT, to accept, either whether it's a hard coded, time in transit change. So, Joe may decide that, UPI or, you know, from from from Kentucky to Ohio says that it's a a two day service. Now it's now a three day service. He could make that individual change if he wanted to. Or or Jeff's team could go ahead and run an analysis and say, hey. Here's an entire file with, every single one of our origins and all 42,000 destination ZIP codes or, you know, the first three of the zips and say, this is the way we want this for every single carrier service. Or finally, you could be using either with your own or with an external company. There are many of them that are starting to put this information out. AI driven information to feed into that. In the engine itself, it's not being calculated in real time AI. It shouldn't be. That it that is something that, takes a lot of time to calculate and therefore should be, run-in batches. In real time, the system can take that altered time in transit and leverage it in order to, in order to ensure that we are taking advantage of what we expect, what we predict AI, what we predict that time in transit to be rather than what the carrier has advertised it to be. Alright. Moving forward, since Rugged focuses on premium brands, how do you ensure that cost control techniques like using budget carriers or consolidated shipping don't degrade the unboxing experience and perceived value of your high end brand? So a lot of it does have to do with the packaging, I believe. You know, that that it comes in branded, nice packaging. We change it for holiday. And back to, like, one of the first things we talked about is we will use budget, low cost carriers because we have to drive margin, but to a point. And at that point, at a point where we think it's affecting the member, we will stop and use a more premium carrier to solve those problems. So we we don't always think about the unboxing experience, but it is built into that branded box. We try to have a really clean, crisp tracking updates. It's not about, sometimes not about how fast you get there. As long as the customer believes they're gonna get it, when you say they're gonna get it, they're happy. So we try to make that solid and always keep our promises. Excellent. Alright. And last question we're gonna have time for, from our audience. How could or should carrier mixes change if companies prioritize flexibility and I think you need to start with your single carrier. Right? You have to under have to understand of how much you can move without getting into, like, a violation problem with your contract. Once you know that number, and then the next step is what's your technology. So ProShip for us allows us to move carriers around. So I I so that hurdle is gone. Right? Some people you might wanna get away from a single carrier, but if you don't have a rate shopping engine, you can want anything you want. You can't have it. You need you need a way to be able to make those different decisions based on business rules. And then it's about we've taken the approach of being very honest with our national carrier and said, hey. You said you don't want t shirts. We're gonna look for a place to put our T shirts. And they sometimes, two years ago, they said, no. Here's better pricing. We're keeping those T shirts. That's easy. And sometimes, like, yeah. There go ahead. So then we put that we put that not out for bid, but we start looking around for opportunities to save money on this example on t shirts. So I believe back to relationship, you maintain that relationship with your national, your big provider, and work with them to get the the diversity you need and the flexibility you need to make your business successful. So it benefits both parties. Your margin maybe goes up for them. You're around two years from now because you save costs, and they still maintain a big chunk of your business. Nice. Alright. Well, I I really appreciate time from both of you today. It was excellent for both of you bringing all the great value in the conversation. I wanna thank everybody who's joined and participated. We got a lot of chats. We got a lot of questions. It was really great. Now for the portion you've all been waiting for and stuck around because we're moving to the live giveaway portion. As you've been watching, our team has been tracking engagement throughout the session to choose winners at random. Sounds like we've got our first give our first giveaway winner selected. Before we get to it, quick note to our winners, you'll receive an email from us after the webinar. When you go to claim your gift, just confirm your shipping address so we can get everything sent out. First, the, Titleist Tea Time collection. This goes to and I did not practice names beforehand, so this will be fun. Peter, of Branch Furniture. Hopefully, I did not murder that last name too much. Next is the Don Julio, 1942 with custom engraving. A favorite of Joe's, so we had to include it. And the winner is Mike Charbinu of, Maurice's. Existing customer. Great. Number three and one of my favorites, the Schock Bluetooth earbuds, a personal favorite of mine. I swear by it, the winner is, Maui Maj Moaj Everett. Maj, you're? here. Maj. Maj, sorry. Yeah. Doing this too fast. Yeah. So so, Maj, you've got the, the shock Bluetooth earbuds. They're great. You can hear everything around you while you're outside. It's pretty cool. And then, the the conclude the giveaway, our final item is the lab grown diamond bracelet, something specifically from Rue Gilts and, Rue La La brand. And the winner is Christy Watkins of, FTD. Win winners, watch for your email, to claim your prize, confirm your address. We can get those things sent out for you today. Unfortunately, that's all we have time for today. Thank again thank you again to Jeff and Joe, our speakers. This was great, and hopefully everybody will have a great day. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.