What is a 3PL (And When Do D2C Founders Need One)?

You can tell how successful your D2C brand is by how boring your biggest questions are.

When you start, it’s all about how to bring your products to life or build a brand on TikTok. Once you hit 50 daily orders, you start running out of space in your parents’ attic to store products and spend your evenings asking ChatGPT: “What’s a third-party logistics provider?”

The problem is you really cannot afford to put those slightly tedious supply chain questions off. Ofcom's 2025 research found that 68% of UK shoppers hit a problem with a parcel delivery in the last six months, with 78% of consumers telling another survey that they were not likely to make a repeat purchase from a brand after a below-par experience.

Learning about logistics might not make you a hit at parties, but it will protect all the hard work you put into building products and a brand that’s actually starting to take off.

So we brought together James Kouhry (CEO of Zendbox and serial founder) and Jordan Blackwell (Head of Supply Chain at Zendbox) to explore how D2C founders can use a third-party logistics provider (3PL) to scale their brand without friction.

One obvious but important disclosure: Zendbox is a 3PL and we undeniably have skin in the game. But we haven’t loaded the dice here; we’re offering an honest take on the subject that founders can use to make better logistics decisions, even if it means going with another partner.

How Do Most Founders Manage Their Logistics?

Very early-stage founders often manage logistics for themselves. Products get stored in their flats, sometimes even at their parents’ or friends’ places. The founder oversees the orders coming in, prints the shipping labels, takes them to the post office, and handles all the returns rigamarole.

That do-it-yourself vibe has some benefits, Jordan says. “You can feel when care has gone into packing and shipping a product,” he explains. “Founders often leave little handwritten notes or gifts in the package, which makes the customer feel special and want to support the brand more.”

This would be termed “first-party logistics” (1PL): the brand owns its own warehousing (if we can call it that), packing, and shipping. There’s a direct line from customers to logistics, which can make it easier to fix orders, as well as meaning the only real costs are courier charges, packaging, and whatever you feel your time is worth.

But James argues that 1PL should really be a short-term necessity, not a long-term solution. “That approach can be quite exciting for a bit,” he says. “But the novelty wears off fast, especially when things ramp up quickly. You often end up missing order deadlines, potentially having to offer refunds or reject orders because there just isn’t time or space to get them delivered.”

That leads founders to outsource these processes via a third-party logistics (3PL) provider. A 3PL offers comprehensive, end-to-end services, including warehousing, picking, packing, and transportation; they essentially take over the entire logistics process.

To get the full scale of what a 3PL can provide, consider this grid:

How Do You Know When It’s Time to Work With a 3PL?

Despite many internet articles and LinkedIn “thought leadership” to the contrary, there are no hard-and-fast rules about when a 3PL becomes beneficial for D2C brands.

“The founder guru-verse is filled with hyper-specific guidelines that lose a lot of nuance,” James says. “You don’t have to work with a 3PL when you hit 300 monthly orders. You also don’t have to wait until you hit that number before there are benefits.”

James and Jordan agree that there are several reasons you might decide to keep things in-house, too:

• Your volume is genuinely low: Under a few hundred orders a month, the per-item economics rarely beat doing it yourself or paying someone locally for two afternoons a week. A temp hire is cheaper than a contract.
• The unboxing is the product: If customers buy partly because of how the parcel arrives, and that experience depends on judgement rather than a spec, outsourcing it well is possible but harder and more expensive than founders expect. Get the spec written and tested before you hand it over, not after.
• Every order is different: High personalisation, made-to-order items, or a long tail of one-off variants all cost more to outsource than they look, because the work that makes them special is the work a warehouse process is designed to strip out.
• You only get busy twice a year: If your volume is genuinely seasonal, you may be better off with flexible seasonal labour than with a year-round contract sized for your peak.
• You are about to change the product: Reformulating, resizing, or moving suppliers mid-transition means onboarding a 3PL to a spec that will be obsolete in three months. Move after the change, not during it.

Jordan suggests founders approach the question from a cost-benefit perspective. While 3PLs use different pricing systems, most charge based on a per-item basis, along with certain value-added services. That means you can project the cost of working with a 3PL and compare it to the potential value of having your time and space back.

“There are hidden costs to think about,” James says. “Some providers make their service definitions vague so they can charge for extra services. But if you trust the 3PL, the question is really: ‘will outsourcing logistics help me grow enough to offset the cost?’”

Another approach is to wait for specific triggers. James says there are many common factors that lead founders to start working with a 3PL:

If you encounter any of these triggers, a 3PL is likely to offer tangible benefits. But that raises another question:

How Do You Choose a 3PL Provider?

“Most founders are a little torn about working with a 3PL,” Jordan says. “You get your time back and the service is far more consistent, but it’s easy to feel you’re also losing control.”

That fear is not always misplaced either, James points out. There have been some pretty high-profile scare stories about lost stock. So it’s not like outsourcing is just this simple solution to all your fulfillment problems; you need to be really careful who you work with.

“You see a lot of lists that cite a bunch of technical factors or specific services to look for,” Jordan says. “But that kind of ‘checklist’ approach is pretty limited. You need your 3PL to operate as an extension of your brand, which means they should really be evaluated more like an employee than a vendor.”

James says that’s really the key to choosing a partner. “You need a partner that’s really going to help you adapt over time, not just manage your warehouse,” he says. “Most of the big questions are really about the company’s values, not just their picking technology or warehouse management system.”

He recommends every D2C founder uses the following criteria to evaluate any prospective 3PL:

Ready to Get Back to the Fun Questions?

Nobody builds a D2C brand hoping one day they’ll spend their evenings thinking about IOSS paperwork or warehouse visibility. And while those boring questions are important, the real benefit of working with a 3PL is you don’t have to answer them alone.