One container, more than one product

A forty foot high cube does not care what is inside it. It holds what it holds, and it costs what it costs, whether that is one product or six.

Most suppliers care, because most suppliers make one thing.

So if you buy flooring from one factory, wall panels from another and decking from a third, you are not buying three products. You are buying three containers, three sailing dates, three sets of documents and three sets of terms, and you are committing a full container to each one before you know whether the second and third will sell.

That is the real barrier to opening a category. Not the product and not the price. Nobody will ship you one pallet, so a new line has to be a container sized bet or it does not happen at all.

Because our five factories work as a group, the box can be mixed.

What that changes:

• Test a category at a pallet or two instead of committing to a container of it
• Top up a flooring order with the wall panels or the decking, and fill the space you have already paid for
• One booking, one bill of lading, one set of documents, one counterparty
• One quality standard across everything in the box, because the group agreed one

What it does not change, and you should hear it from me rather than find out at the booking:

• There is still a minimum per item and per colour. A production line does not run for one pallet, and mixing does not repeal that
• Consolidating across factories takes a little longer than one factory loading its own container, so build a few days into the schedule
• The categories have to be ones we actually make. This is a group of factories, not a catalogue

Tell me which categories you want in the box and the port you want it at, and I will come back with what fits, what the minimums are, and what it does to your landed cost per square metre.