BUILD | LOGISTICS
Impossible Triangle
I spent forty-five minutes today explaining why shipping is complicated to an app developer. On his screen, software travels at the speed of light. In my world, a twenty-foot container filled with backpacks and travel mugs moves against a Force 8 headwind in the North Atlantic. If you build digital products, your mistakes are fixed with a patch and a deployment. If you build physical things, your mistakes sit in a warehouse in Haiphong for three weeks because a paperwork error triggered a secondary inspection. You miss the Black Friday sales. Your budget goes to hell.
The math of moving objects always breaks down into three variables that absolutely hate each other: speed, cost, and inventory control. You can do well on two of them, but the third will always try to kill your margin.
If you want fast delivery and low shipping costs, you have to hold mountains of inventory close to the customer. That means tying up every cent of your cash flow in 500D nylon and heavy-gauge zippers that might not sell for six months. If you want to keep your inventory lean and still move fast, your shipping costs go through the roof as you panic-air-freight boxes across the Pacific. If you want low costs and tight inventory, your customers end up waiting three weeks while their order hitches a ride on a slow boat from Hong Kong.
Amazon has effectively reset the human brain to find a three-day wait offensive.
Most brands try to survive this by scattering warehouses across their key markets. They put a hub in Northampton, one in New Jersey, and maybe one in the EU. It looks organized on a slide deck. But the reality is forty-five days of pure guesswork while a ship crosses the ocean. You are essentially betting your company's life on whether a person in Berlin wants a charcoal grey bag more than a person in Austin wants a black one.
You are always wrong. Or at least I have been.
I have a graveyard of spreadsheets that prove my inability to predict the aesthetic whims of two different hemispheres. Every brand I have ever been part of ends up with a surplus of the wrong color in the wrong country. The math never actually settles. You end up overstocked in the UK and sold out in the US, paying a fulfillment partner to let your product gather dust while your most loyal customers are staring at a Notify Me button.
Adding more hubs just compounds the error. You are not scaling. You are just multiplying the number of inventory pools you have to manage.
I am still staring at the spreadsheet for the New Jersey hub. The rent is higher than the logic suggests, and the fees are aggressive. Most operators I talk to are stuck in this loop where they cannot afford to stay and cannot afford to leave. It is a quiet war of attrition against the balance sheet.
I might be overthinking the regional model. The complexity feels like a trap we are walking into with our eyes open. We are still testing the limits of how much patience a customer actually has when the product is built to last a decade. I would rather be worth the wait than fast and forgettable.