Tommy John’s previous fulfillment model featured a network of multiple providers as the company grew its business — but that setup came at a cost, Tommy John CFO Gernot Senke told Supply Chain Dive. Now, the brand leverages Cart.com as its sole U.S. fulfillment provider for its domestic logistics.
When managing multiple fulfillment partners, Tommy John was reconciling data, chasing inventory accuracy and navigating visibility gaps that "should not exist at this stage of the business," Senke said.
"The visibility problem was the one that kept coming back. When your inventory lives across multiple providers, you are always working from an incomplete picture,” Senke said. These recurring issues became a greater challenge when handling customer queries, making replenishment decisions, or understanding trends during high volume periods.
“We needed one partner who could own the full picture,” Senke said. This is when Cart.com, a fulfillment service provider for unified order and inventory management, came into play. Cart.com operates its own network of 18 fulfillment and distribution centers.
Tommy John’s transition to Cart.com handling its fulfillment meant making Terrell, Texas its central hub, according to a May 21 press release. The Texas facility gives the retailer a geographic reach to its customers, clean data, inventory visibility and faster delivery.
The main reason that Cart.com stood out for Tommy John was the company's ability to execute on a compressed timeline without disrupting operations, Senke said.
“We did our homework. Fulfillment is not a decision you make lightly when you are operating at our volume, and we looked at our options seriously,” he said.
Tommy John was able to have its inventory received, systems integrated and order flow without no gaps, Joe Barth, Cart.com's chief logistics officer, said in an email. The transition was completed in April in a matter of weeks with no interruptions to its delivery performance, per the press release.
“A transition like this has a lot of moving parts. You are taking on a brand’s entire U.S. fulfillment operation, often on a compressed timeline, and the margin for error is low because the customer never knows a transition is happening and shouldn’t,” Barth said.
Switching to a single fulfillment provider is a growing trend, according to Barth.
“Consumer expectations around delivery speed have reset permanently. Two-day delivery is the baseline now, even during peak season when carrier networks are under the most pressure,” Barth said.
Simultaneously, brands that grow fast are relying on a fulfillment model that was built for an earlier version of the business, Barth said. An older infrastructure can mean working with multiple providers, contracts and data sets that don’t align.
Tommy John joins Cart.com’s growing list of retail partners, including Pacsun, Toms Shoes and The Body Shop.
“Fulfillment touches every part of the customer relationship at Tommy John. It’s the last thing we control before the product reaches the customer’s hands, and in a lot of ways it’s the first thing the customer actually experiences,” Senke said.
