Menachem Chayempour

Founder @ 3PL matchmaking for e-commerce and retail brands | Author of

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

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[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

If you're subscribed to my newsletter, you know I've been covering the effects of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs on the apparel fulfillment space.

But yesterday, something changed that nobody's pricing in yet.

Medicare just launched an 18-month program that drops obesity drugs to a $50 copay.

Novo and Eli Lilly estimate up to 20 million seniors could sign up.

20 million people aged 65 and older are potentially dropping clothing sizes over the next year and a half.

Here's what that does to a warehouse.

Every forecast, every size curve, every return model built around GLP-1 so far was built on one customer: the 30-something buying off Instagram and shipping back what doesn't fit.

Seniors don't shop like that.

Different channels. Different sizes. Different return behavior.

The brands serving that demographic have never had to plan for their entire customer base shrinking at once.

Now they do.

And the 3PLs behind those brands are about to inherit a size-migration problem in a customer segment nobody modeled.

The wave everyone prepped for was the young one.

The one landing now is older, bigger, and completely off your forecast.

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

There is a law that most 3PLs aren't aware of, but it could be costing their customers $25,000 a day in fines.

The deadlines aren't months out. They're already passing.

Oregon published a public list of around 300 companies that failed to comply.

And several states don't just fine you. They ban non-compliant companies from selling into the state at all.

Here's the thing:
The brand isn't always the one on the hook.

Depending on the details, it can land on the platform, the manufacturer, or the distributor.

Which means it could land on you, or one of your clients, and nobody flagged it.

Most of your clients are operating as if none of this exists.

Being the partner who warns them before the clock starts is worth a lot more than a rate quote.

I broke down which states, the deadlines, and how to tell if you're on the hook in this week's newsletter.

https://t.co/mlFxWKuFzT

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

A guy I met with last week was wearing a $70,000 watch.

You know the reflex. You see a watch like that, and your brain starts doing math. What would someone have to be earning to justify that? How successful do you have to be before a watch costs more than most people's annual salary?

So I sat down assuming I was talking to someone who had it figured out.

By the end of the conversation, I found out he's weeks away from filing for bankruptcy.

The watch wasn't proof of success.

It was the costume.

And I keep seeing brands make the exact same mistake when they pick a 3PL.

They walk into the big, glamorous operation. The dozens of facilities. The big-name partnerships. The website that says "industry leader." The 'rewards' and 'recognitions' that you and I know are all bought.

And they read all that polish as proof that the company underneath is healthy.

It's the watch all over again.

Some of the most impressive-looking 3PLs are quietly underwater. Overextended leases. Margins thinner than they'll ever admit. A sales team promising things operations never signed off on. Meanwhile the 12-client shop with no debt and an owner who knows every SKU in the building by heart looks small, so brands walk right past it.

Size is visible. Health takes a few more questions to find.

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

UPS just spent $48 million to chase the least sexy work in logistics.

27 temperature-controlled cross-dock facilities.
Refrigerated cargo that breaks if it sits in the wrong dock for an hour.

UPS is running towards the work everyone else is running from.

Amazon is eating the middle of this industry. The standardized, predictable, easy-to-quote volume. The stuff any 3PL can do, which means the stuff every 3PL competes on by cutting price.

A pallet of t-shirts is a pallet of t-shirts.

There is no version of that work in which you win on anything other than rate.

But a refrigerated pallet of biologics at the wrong temperature isn't a late shipment. It's a destroyed shipment and a patient who doesn't get their medication.

That gap is the whole game.

UPS isn't betting on refrigeration. They're betting that the hard stuff is the only stuff worth owning in five years.

I broke down exactly why this is happening now, the market data behind the bet, and what it signals about where margin is actually moving in this week's newsletter.

Plus the early peak season nobody's staffed for, and what Amazon's Prime Day lineup is quietly telling you about your own clients.

Link: https://t.co/m6Sj395wME

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

I'm humbled to be a part of MANGOFS

It's not easy rewriting the rules of tech, but nothing worth having comes easy.

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

"I hate that my 3PL doesn't give me a dedicated account manager."

Ok, what's your order volume?

350 orders per month.

And who are you with?

Names a mid-sized 3PL.

That's the issue. A brand your size shouldn't be at a mid-sized 3PL if you want a personalized experience.

Most 3PLs offer account management to every client no matter the size. But only their highest-grossing accounts get a dedicated manager. The rest share.
Think about it.

You're generating $3,000 a month in revenue, and you want them to dedicate an account manager they're paying $4,000 to $7,000 a month?

Make that make sense.

So what's the move if you're a smaller brand that still wants real service and attention?

Go small.

At a small 3PL, you'll be a great fit at your volume. You'll get an account manager. And that account manager is probably the owner himself.

And there are thousands of these amazing 3PLs worldwide.

This is why I keep repeating it:

There's no such thing as the "best 3PL."

Just the right fit.

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

If you want to annoy me on our first call together, say something like: "I've been in this industry 25 years."

I hear it on calls all the time. And it's usually code for: So sit down and let me talk.

Here's my problem with it.

Time served is not the same thing as expertise.

You can spend 25 years in logistics and have genuinely seen everything. Every cycle, every disruption, every hard lesson.

Or you can spend 25 years in the same seat, at the same company, doing the same thing, and have one year of experience repeated 24 times.

Let me put it another way.

A guy who walked out to grab milk and never came back has technically been a father longer than I have.

That doesn't make him a better one.

The number of years tells you how long. It tells you nothing about what happened inside them.

So when someone leads with the number, it tells me almost nothing. What I actually want to know is the other stuff. What have you been exposed to? How many different problems have you had to solve? What have you built? Where have you been wrong, and what did you do about it?

And to be clear, this isn't me dumping on experience. Real experience is priceless.

What I can't stand is the number used as a shield. As permission to walk into every conversation assuming the other person has nothing to teach you.

The best operators I know, the ones with real decades behind them, are the most curious people in the room. They've been doing this forever and still ask questions like they're new.

That's what 25 years should make you.

Humble. Not certain.

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

Many 3PLs thought Ozempic would be good for business.

And initially, they were correct.

The US saw somewhere between 150 and 700 million additional apparel items purchased thanks to 1 in 8 US adults being on a GLP-1 drug, requiring them to buy entirely new wardrobes.

A wave of new orders was great news for apparel brands and the 3PLs servicing them.

But all of a sudden, there came an influx of returns.

The thing is, someone on a GLP-1 doesn't refresh their wardrobe once and stop.

At peak weight loss, they can drop a clothing size every single month.
So they order a medium. Three weeks later the medium is too big. Back it comes, and now they want a small. Then the small is too big.

Their customers are now a six-month moving target.

The data is already showing up everywhere:
A suit shop owner has watched returns climb 50% in the past year. He's now literally asking customers if they're on a weight-loss journey before they buy, because they keep ordering the same suit in three sizes at once.

A returns platform serving dozens of retailers found that exchanges where the shopper sized DOWN hit a record high in 2025, climbing for three straight years.

One women's brand says "too big" went from a third of their returns to over 60%.

And the thing that sucks the most is that the returns aren't spread evenly. They're stacking up in medium, large, and XL, because that's exactly where everyone's sizing down FROM.

Which means the highest return rates are landing on the exact inventory brands ordered the most of.

Retailers are fighting back the only ways they can. Doubling restocking fees. Rewriting size charts. Begging people to measure themselves.

None of it fully works. Because the problem was never bad sizing info.
The customer's body is genuinely a different size than it was the day they hit "buy."

If you fulfill apparel, your inbound returns are lumpier than your forecasts were ever built to handle. This is a reverse-logistics problem, and most returns operations weren't designed to absorb this kind of churn.

I broke down what it means for 3PLs and which brands actually survive it in this week's Logistics Pulse.

Link:
https://t.co/YYbiAhN4Os

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

I need help from my UK and EU 3PL providers:

I've got an established home decor and kitchenware brand expanding into Europe, and they need 3PL partners in the Netherlands and the UK (UK site ideally near Southampton Port).

Inbound, storage, and outbound, both B2B and B2C.

This is not a high-volume pure-DTC account. They have a wide rotating SKU base (200-350), and currently very low monthly order volume (as it's a new market for them).

Storage is also tricky here because it's better suited to shelf storage priced per CFT rather than pallet racking.

So I'm NOT looking for a warehouse chasing big ecommerce throughput. I'm looking for a 3PL that's genuinely comfortable with high-SKU, shelf-stored, mixed-channel operations and prices accordingly.

If that's you, or you know the right operator in NL or the UK, drop a comment or DM me.

Save us both the time of a proposal that ends in "not a fit."

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

The average DTC brand loses money on the first order.

Customer acquisition costs are up 222% over eight years, while only about 28% of first-time buyers ever come back for a second order.

So now you're paying more than ever to get a customer.
You lose money the first time they buy, and 7 out of 10 of them never come back to make you whole.

So your entire business now lives or dies on the second order. Which means the most important moment in your whole funnel isn't the ad. It isn't the checkout. It's everything that happens AFTER they hit buy.

And that's the part most brands outsource.

Think about what actually decides whether someone orders again: Did it show up fast? Did it show up correct? Was the unboxing something they'd want to film instead of complain about? When they had to return something, was it painless or was it a nightmare?

Every one of those happens inside your 3PL's four walls. Not your marketing team's.

The best ad creative on the internet means nothing if the box shows up late, wrong, or beat to hell.

For years, brands have treated fulfillment as a cost center. A line item to squeeze. The cheapest pick fee wins. But if you lose money on order one, and order two is the only thing that saves you, then your fulfillment partner is the single biggest factor in whether this whole thing is a business or a slow bleed.

So before you choose a 3PL, the only question that matters is: will these guys get me to my second order?

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

I pulled the Trustpilot reviews for two of the biggest names in fulfillment.

ShipBob scores 3.7/5 on Trustpilot (976 reviews), with 72% five-star but 17% one-star.

ShipMonk scores 3.7/5 on Trustpilot (418 reviews) with 70% five-star but 20% one-star.

They've both got this pile of five-stars and a hard knot of one-stars, but interestingly enough, nothing in between.

Judging by the reviews, it seems they're doing great work for some clients and dropping the ball for others, creating a rave-or-rage dynamic in their reviews.

This example perfectly demonstrates what you need to know about choosing a 3PL.

These providers aren't delivering a great experience or a terrible one by accident. They're built a certain way for a certain kind of brand, with a certain product profile, volume, and level of complexity.

If you fit that mold, you're one of the 70% who write a glowing review.

If you don't, you're one of the 20% who warn in Reddit threads.

Same 3PL. Same warehouse. Same team. Completely opposite outcome.

This is why I hate when brands ask me for the "best" 3PL.

There is no best 3PL.

That five-star review you read was written by a brand that might look nothing like yours. Different product. Different margins. Different needs. Their perfect fit could be your worst nightmare.

The question was never "who's the best."
The question is "who's the best for me."

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

Will Stord be the next Flexport?

Stord raised $250M at a $3B valuation to "surpass Prime."

We've watched enough of these pitches to know the graveyard is full of companies that said the same thing.

Flexport peaked at $8B. It's worth less than half that now. Convoy is gone. Deliverr got absorbed.

So, when a 3PL doubles its valuation in 12 months on the back of 8 acquisitions, I ask one question.

And the answer is the only thing that tells you whether Stord cracked the model everyone before it failed at, or whether it's running the same playbook that looked brilliant right up until it didn't.

There's also a bigger problem hiding in the pitch itself, one that affects every operator reading this, not just Stord.

I broke down both in this week's Logistic Pulse. Link: https://t.co/Oif7fatBmK

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

Warehouse workers' biggest fear isn't getting replaced by AI.

A Fast Company piece this month surveyed 200+ Amazon and Walmart workers. 62% said their top concern was HR decisions getting handed to a chatbot.

The example: a worker got a concussion on the job. Doctor put her on restricted duty. It took over a month to get the right accommodation paperwork because the internal AI assistant kept sending the wrong form, and there was no human in HR to reach.

While she waited, the system flagged her for working too slowly.

The slowness her doctor ordered!

You can automate scheduling. Picking. Invoicing.

But automate the person someone calls when they're hurt, scared, or confused, and you've built a company people leave.

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

@CrumptonJack That's the way it's done!

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

Any time a 3PL tells a brand on a sales call, "We'll find a way to get it done." It scares me.

It usually means "no idea how, but we'll figure it out on your dime."

No process. No plan. The whole pitch is one word:

Trust.

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

For years, freight brokers had a legal shield that made it nearly impossible to sue them when a carrier they hired caused an accident.

Last week, that shield disappeared.

If your current carrier vetting process is "they have a valid license and insurance," I'd have a conversation with your lawyer this week.

This was just one of the stories we covered in this week's Logistic Pulse newsletter.

We also got into how trucks are saving the day since the Homuz closure. How tariff refunds are actually hitting importer accounts right now, faster than anyone expected. And a Canadian last-mile company that went from $113 million to $683 million in revenue in two years and is now eyeing a public debut.

Every week, I put together the stories worth actually paying attention to, and more importantly, what they mean for the people running freight and fulfillment businesses.

Read this week's edition 46: https://t.co/ml9gXUhtli

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

If you want to know what Amazon's new Supply Chain Service actually means for your 3PL,

Or why a rally outside a Home Depot headquarters on May 1st should have every final-mile operator paying attention,

Or what eBay's 17% sales growth has to do with the future of recommerce fulfillment,

It's all in this week's newsletter.

Edition #44, link 👇
https://t.co/TA2Bph01jj

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

New 3PL prediction:
Flat fees are coming back!

Why?

Because brands are demanding predictability more than ever.

The current model, line items for every touch, fee for receiving, fee for scanning, fee for put away, fee for storage, fee for pick, fee for pack, fee for label, fee for the carrier handoff, is turning every invoice into an argument.

Brands are tired of it.

And for 3PLs, besides flat fees being easier for billing, they're now offering a new product: predictability.

Flat fees are harder to price in terms of profitability, but once you figure out your formula, you will have a massive sales advantage because you're now selling simplicity in an industry notorious for complexity.

[Menachem Chayempour @Menachem0]

A brand came to me 4 months into evaluating 11 3PLs.

I asked what was stopping them from deciding.

"We just want to make sure we're not missing anything."

After 4 months and 11 conversations, you're no longer gathering information. You're avoiding a decision.

The right 3PL was probably in the first three.

And here's the part most brands don't think about: 3PLs talk. A brand that's been shopping for 4 months signals indecision. It signals difficulty. Good 3PLs are selective. You might not make their shortlist.

Know when you have enough to decide. Then decide.