Lara Guevara argues that shipping each order as soon as it's ready wastes money. Freight rates rise 10-20% during peak season, but a scheduled shipping cadence lets you consolidate shipments, lock in lower rates before August, and cut costs across marketing, finance, and fulfillment.
Chapters
Freight rates are forecast to climb 10 to 20% as we head into peak, and most brands are going to feel that and just absorb it. And the reason is almost never negotiation skill, it's that they never built a shipping team. They ship whenever a PO happens to be ready. I'm Lara, this is MOOC Supply Chain, and this week is a bit different for me personally. Most brands have a shipping process, almost none have a shipping cadence, and those are generally the freight rates. A process is when a PO's ready, we ship it. A cadence is decided rhythm— weekly, biweekly, whatever fits your volume— where shipments get consolidated on purpose instead of going out reactively one at a time. And here's why that matters to your budget specifically. Reactive one-off Shipping means you're negotiating freight constantly, on the fly, and almost always from urgency because something needs to move now. A decided cadence means you want for a quarter from predictability, and carriers price certainly lower than cruise. Every time, that's not a relationship thing, it's how their capacity plan works. 3 parts. Consolidation rhythm, decide in writing how often shipments actually go out. Weekly for higher volume, biweekly works for a lot of brands I talk to in the $1 to $3 million range. The specific rhythm matters much less than having one settled. Carrier redundancy. If you're booked with one carrier, you have zero leverage and zero backup the moment capacity tightens or a route gets disrupted. 2 or 3 qualified carriers with the relationship established before you need it. Is what redundancy actually means. Establishing it during a crisis isn't redundancy; it's begging. Rate locks. This one has a real deadline on it. Whatever room you have to negotiate a cap rate for the peaks window, you have more of it in August than you will be in October when everyone else is fighting for the same capacity. Now the part I think is genuinely underrated, and it's why. I keep pushing cadence with clients even when freight isn't their biggest line item. A shipping cadence isn't a logistics decision, it's the heartbeat everyone else in your business schedules against. And without one, every other team is planning against a guess and calling it a plan. Start with marketing. What date can they put in an email? Right now, at most brands, the answer is a number somebody made up with a safety margin bolted on. Because nobody could give them a real one. So they either promise something conservative and lose conversions, or promise something optimistic and generate a support ticket for every owner. With a cadence, they can say a real date because the ship window is decided thing rather than hope. That single change tends to do more for a conversation than most of the copywork people obsess over. Now, customer experience, same route. Most of what your support inbox handles in Q4 is, where is my order? And most of that specific exists because somebody promised a date that was invented. Fix the cadence, the promise gets real, the tickets drop. Your CX person didn't get better at their job, you stop generating the work. Now, finance, and this one surprises people. A cadence turns freight from a lumpy, unpredictable outflow into something you can actually forecast. If you consolidate by weekly, you know roughly when freight money leaves. If you ship reactively, freight is a series of surprises, and series of surprises is exactly what makes a 13-week cash forecast useless. I've had clients tell me that their cash forecasts got dramatically more accurate after a cadence change And they had no idea that was going to happen. Merchandising and launch planning. If you know your ship windows, you can set launch dates against real arrival, which means you stop doing the thing where a launch gets announced, then quietly slips, then gets re-announced, and the audience learns your dates are not real. Audiences learn that fast, by the way. It's very hard to out-punish. And your 3PL consolidated arrivals on a common rhythm are bookable. Reactive arrivals are it. And in Q4, an unbookable arrival means your on-time shipment sits on a dock because nobody confirmed there was room to receive it. A perfectly executed shipment that cannot be received is still stockout. The customer cannot tell the difference, and honestly, neither your P&L. So count that up. Marketing gets a real promise date. CX gets fewer tickets. Finance gets a forecastable outflow. Merch gets launch dates that hold. Fulfillment gets a bookable slot. And that's 5 teams that get better at their jobs because of a decision made in logistics. And this is the part I want you to take from the whole month, honestly. The highest leverage supply chain decisions almost never look like supply chain decisions from the outside. They look like Everyone else suddenly having a less chaotic quarter, which is also roughy. The thing I'm going to be asking about on Thursday, because building the cadence is the part I know how to do. What happens to it afterwards is the part I— So the owner's test, and I'm running it differently this week for obvious reasons. Process versus cadence is the technician versus manager distinction. A process is what a skilled person does when the situation arises. It needs somebody good to be there paying attention, deciding. A cadence is what happens on a schedule whether or not that person is watching. That's the difference between owning a job and owning a business. And in my experience, it shows up in freight before it shows up anywhere else. Because freight is where Somebody else puts a price on your attention and they send you an invoice for it. 4 questions on your shipping calendar: what it's called, the shipping calendar, who runs it when you're not in the room. And with a cadence, there's a genuinely good answer available, which is that a cadence can be run by somebody considerably more junior than whoever designed it. That's the entire point of it. You think once at a high level and execute at a low one. Designing a cadence is your work. Running it isn't. If you're still running it in 6 months, you didn't build a system. You built yourself a calendar. When does it recur? Shipments on the rhythm, rate review quarterly, carrier shortage refresh twice a year, 3 different clocks, none of them on your calendar. Where is it written down? One page, rhythm, carriers, cutoffs, who books, who gets told. And now the part I can't answer, which is genuinely why I'm doing this on Thursday. I've spent this whole month on this channel telling you to build systems that run without you. Over August, we've built 5, and if I'm honest with you, I'd say 2 of them at MOOB actually survived me being away for a fortnight. The other 3 come back to me Not because anyone failed, because I take them back. That's the bit I don't understand about myself yet. I hand something over, it's fine, and then 6 weeks later I'm in it again, and I can usually produce a very reasonable-sounding explanation for why this particular one needed— I've done it enough times now to notice it's a pattern rather than a series of exceptions. So the question isn't, how do you build a system? I know how to build one. Most of you watching know how to build one. It's why the founder keeps taking it down. Build the cadence, rhythm, redundancy, rate locks. Do the rate lock in the next fortnight specifically, not in October. Next week, we go upstream to what you should be watching while your goods are actually in production because a great shipping cadence doesn't help you if what's coming down the line isn't ready. See you next time.
