Real brands · real product
A glimpse of recent work.
A sample of what moves through the buying seat — packaging, apparel, merch, and gifting we’ve sourced and produced for brands you know.
The product is fine. Everything around it is marked up.
Bottle, label, carton, uniform, fixture, freight lane, customs entry. Every line item runs through a vendor quietly setting your margin. We've sat in those seats — so we know what good costs. We benchmark each line and show you where it's high.
A sample of what moves through the buying seat — packaging, apparel, merch, and gifting we’ve sourced and produced for brands you know.
Most brands treat packaging, merch, displays, and freight as cost line items. The agencies, brokers, and carriers supplying them built businesses on the assumption you won't benchmark.
Most brands never do. We do. We've sat on the buying side of every one of these categories — and we've kept the receipts.
Bottles, cans, jars, cartons, pouches, films, closures, labels. Most brands treat it as fixed. It's the category with the most recoverable margin.
The category brands spend on without ever reading the invoice line by line — swag, samples, gifting, uniform programs, retail merch. Vendor consolidation and factory direct compound fastest here.
The invoices nobody re-bids. Freight contracts auto-renew, customs brokers go unchallenged, and importing markup hides inside "landed cost." The one supply chain category that pays back every single month.
Displays, fixtures, trade-show booths, POP. Agency markups run 30–60% over factory direct. Sometimes earned. Mostly not.
Full supply chain methodology and scope details in our FAQ →
Our vendor and supply partnerships span factories, ports, and 3PLs around the world — because one source is a price-taker's position. One port delay, one tariff change, one "capacity issue" and your margin belongs to someone else. That redundancy is the discipline behind every recovery on this page — here's how it works in practice, from the buying seat.
Three packaging components routed through one agency for six years. Two of three sourced from factories we'd already worked with at list price.
Three of six were sourcing from the same factory at three different prices.
Single broker for nine years. Pricing never benchmarked. Inventory marked up on every replenishment.
Custom fixtures sourced through the design agency. Same fixtures available factory-direct from a builder we'd already worked with.
Parcel and LTL invoices auto-paid for five years. Billing errors, phantom accessorial charges, and a carrier contract that hadn't been re-bid since signing.
Same bottles, same factory. The margin was hiding in the middle: HTS misclassification, broker fees never benchmarked, drayage routed through the wrong port.
* Case studies are representative composites built from typical engagement outcomes.
One short assessment. We pull a few POs and benchmark them to tell you whether there's recoverable margin.