F. Curtis Barry & Company’s Multichannel Operations & Fulfillment Blog

We attended VendorNet’s conference at the beginning of this month to present a speech and a roundtable on Vendor Compliance Policies. The speech covered:
• Role of vendor compliance in reducing costs and speeding receipts through the DC
• Trends in vendor compliance
• Contents of vendor compliance manuals
• […]

It has been seven weeks since BlueSky Brands shut down operations, stranding a number of catalog and e-commerce businesses. Now we’ve received an e-mail that the National Wildlife Federation sent to customers who have purchased items directly from the Federation.
Here’s what the e-mail said:
“There are still many opportunities to receive great wildlife and nature-themed merchandise […]

I just heard from one of our gift and hard good direct clients—one in a series of messages like this I’ve had lately. This latest is that their Chinese producers failed to deliver on goods, costing this small catalog $100,000 in sales even though they had purchase orders in and accepted with confirmed delivery dates.
Another […]

This is a question that needs to be asked because of some recent trends. Consider:
1. Production chases low cost labor. Where Japan and Taiwan were the centers before China, production is starting to move from China to other Asian countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia—as well as Mexico, Central and South […]

“The products in the National Wildlife Catalog are being sold by National Wildlife Direct, a subsidiary of BlueSky Brands, Inc. National Wildlife Federation has licensed its name and logo to BlueSky Brands and receives a 5% royalty fee for the sale of each catalog item. National Wildlife Direct contributes a minimum of $1 million […]

Last week was a tense one for several of our clients, and for our folks here, as we worked to move two of BlueSky’s fulfillment clients to new facilities before BlueSky Brands / AB&C Group this past Friday. We were successful before the doors were shuttered Friday evening. (For more info see Multichannel Merchant Magazine’s […]

There’s been quite a bit of discussion about a new Michigan Services Tax that is expected to hit the state’s logistics and warehouse services businesses especially hard. Business leaders reacted angrily and strongly to the State Legislature’s passage of the tax, which will affect some 16,000 businesses, as part of a budget deal in early […]

After several health-and-safety-related warnings and recalls this year over products from toothpaste to pet food and chicken feed to toys, U.S. consumers are more wary about labels announcing that a product has its source in China. But many companies in the United States now source 50% or more of their products in China. In this […]

We’ll just go out on a limb and guess that the Middle East is not the first part of the world that comes to readers’ minds as an up-and-coming hot spot for outsourcing. “Middle East” these days is likely to make U.S. readers think first of war in Iraq or Afghanistan or fighting in Israel […]

Let’s start with what you might think of as a, well, perhaps provocative quote from an India Daily editorial a year ago:
Body shopping is what Indian software companies call software development. It is facilitated by inefficient American management in American companies that need cheap labor to service arrogant, inefficient and unproductive managers. These American companies […]