Drafts queued for the team. Approve to schedule, or edit inline. Posts published in the last 30 days have brought 9 inbound accounts into the pipeline.
Awaiting your eyes
5
Scheduled this week
2
Published last 30d
2
Inbounds attributed
9 → Pipeline
For your review — 5 drafts
Each is voiced to the author. One tap to ship.
SWSam·Subs·LinkedIn
Most subscription brands track churn. Few track it by despatch cohort.
Most subscription brands track churn. Few track it by despatch cohort.
I pulled 18 months of data for a snack-box brand last week. Subs whose first three boxes arrived on the promised day churned at 4.1%. Subs whose first three boxes were late once churned at 11.7%.
That's not a fulfilment problem. That's a £40k/year retention problem the marketing team will spend three months trying to fix with email automation.
If you're a sub brand and you don't have despatch-on-time visibility by cohort, you're optimising the wrong thing.
SWSam·Drinks·LinkedIn
Breakage rates on glass: what the carriers do not want you to know
Breakage rates on glass: what the carriers do not want you to know.
Royal Mail Tracked 48: 0.9%.
Yodel: 2.4%.
Generic 2-man pallet: 0.3%.
But the cost-per-breakage is not just the unit. It's the customer service time, the replacement-and-refund double-touch, the Trustpilot review, the lost lifetime value.
We model breakage at £19 per incident — well above the £6.50 wholesale cost of the bottle.
If you're a drinks brand and the only number you look at is unit shipping cost, you're missing 80% of the picture.
SWSam·Subs·LinkedIn
6 weeks until Q3 subs peak. Here is the calendar mistake brands keep making.
Six weeks until Q3 subs peak. Here is the calendar mistake brands keep making.
They lock the box content in week 1.
They print the inserts in week 4.
They send the despatch schedule to the 3PL in week 5.
They realise they're 30% over forecast in week 6.
Then they ask why they got short-packed.
The order of operations matters. Get the despatch window to your 3PL before the marketing schedule, not after. We have customers who plan backwards from despatch capacity and customers who don't. The first group never has a peak-season disaster.
SWSam·Drinks·LinkedIn
The new HMRC excise audit window: what drinks brands need to know
The new HMRC excise audit window kicks in this autumn.
If you ship duty-suspended stock and you cannot reconcile every movement against a registered bonded warehouse, you are in trouble.
The brands that survive this are the ones with proper W6/W8 reconciliation built into the pick process. The brands that don't are the ones still tracking it in a spreadsheet next to the despatch sheet.
We've helped two distilleries clean theirs up this quarter. The third is mid-audit and ringing us hourly.
If you're a UK distiller or alcohol importer, this is the deadline that matters.
SWSam·Subs·Blog
The unit economics of subscription fulfilment, properly
Draft: 1,200-word blog on subs unit economics. Covers contribution per box, pick-cost decay at volume, returns-handling cost, cohort-level despatch metrics. Three brand snapshots (anonymised). Targeted at founder/operator readers. Slot for InterSend's despatch-cohort dashboard graphic.
Scheduled — 2
Approved. Queued. Ready to go out.
SWSam·Subs·LinkedIn·17 May
Returns rate on subs is a leading indicator. Most brands treat it as a lagging one.
Returns rate on subs is a leading indicator. Most brands treat it as a lagging one.
A 6% returns spike this month is a 12% churn spike next month. Always. The customers who return the box this month are signalling they're done. The cancellation comes 30 days later.
If you wait for the cancellation number to move, you've already lost the cohort. The intervention has to happen the week the returns move.
How quickly does your 3PL surface this? Daily? Weekly? Monthly in a board pack?
SWSam·Drinks·LinkedIn·20 May
Carrier consolidation by region: the move drinks brands keep ignoring
Carrier consolidation by region: the move drinks brands keep ignoring.
Most drinks brands use 2-3 carriers and split shipments by weight. Smart move on cost. Terrible move on customer experience.
We've found that consolidating to one carrier per postcode region (not per shipment) cuts negative-review-by-postcode by ~40%. Same cost. Better experience. The data is in the carrier-by-postcode reports nobody is running.
If you don't know your worst region by carrier, you are paying for an avoidable churn problem.
Published — last 30 days
With pipeline attribution.
SWSam·Subs·LinkedIn·8 May
Speciality coffee subs have a per-unit problem
Speciality coffee subs have a per-unit problem.
Per-bag cost looks small. Multiplied across 800 subscribers, with a weekly refresh schedule and a roastery 4 hours from the despatch warehouse, it isn't.
We work with two roasters who moved their packing to InterSend last quarter. Both saw per-unit fulfilment cost drop 23% — not from cheaper labour, but from cutting the roastery-to-warehouse leg out of the operation.
If you're a coffee sub roasting in one place and despatching from another, that gap is where the margin lives.
Impressions
4,820
Reactions
71
Comments
14
Inbounds
3 → Pipeline
SWSam·Drinks·LinkedIn·5 May
Three things craft drinks brands underestimate when moving to DTC
Three things craft drinks brands underestimate when moving to DTC.
1. Bottle weight pushes you into carrier brackets that flip the per-order maths.
2. Age-verified delivery costs more per attempt than per success.
3. Glass breakage compounds across the customer service tail, not just the replacement unit.
I'm seeing distilleries plan their first DTC year off a per-bottle shipping cost. None of them survive Q2 of the plan.
Plan off contribution per order, not unit cost. The maths is different. The decisions follow.