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
4
Scheduled this week
2
Published last 30d
2
Inbounds attributed
9 → Pipeline
For your review — 4 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.
JBJohn·Subs·LinkedIn
After 30 years in fulfilment, I have stopped believing in "scale"
After 30 years in this game, I have stopped believing in "scale".
I have watched 3PLs grow from 2,000 orders a week to 200,000 and lose every brand that mattered. Because at 200,000 orders, no one in the building knows the brand's name. The founder calls the account manager and gets a ticket number.
The brands that grow with you are the brands you treat as if they were the only one.
InterSend has fewer customers than most of our competitors. We do not apologise for that.
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·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?
JBJohn·Subs·LinkedIn·19 May
The fulfilment team makes the brand promise real
The fulfilment team makes the brand promise real.
A founder will spend £40k on a brand identity refresh, then ask my warehouse manager why we can't drop the per-unit pick rate by 3p.
The £40k is mostly a hope. The 3p is a knife in the brand experience the customer actually receives.
You can rebrand the box. You cannot rebrand a late despatch.
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
JBJohn·Subs·LinkedIn·2 May
The brand customer who pays the most is rarely the one with the longest contract
The brand customer who pays the most is rarely the one with the longest contract.
We renewed two contracts this quarter. The largest is a craft brand we have served for nine years on a one-page agreement. The other was on a five-year deal and walked the day the term ended.
Long contracts protect the side that needs protecting. The customer that wants to leave will leave. The customer that wants to stay does not need the paperwork.
I have stopped chasing the long-term contract. I would rather earn the next month.