DC Velocity - May 2017

BY MARK B. SOLOMON, EXECUTIVE EDITOR – NEWS

MOTOR FREIGHT
Transportation

MOST SHIPPERS ASSOCIATE AVERITT EXPRESS INC. with its less-than-truckload (LTL) business that serves customers in 13 states in the Sunbelt, the Carolinas, and the Mid-Atlantic. Or with its role in “The Reliance Network,” a group of seven regional LTL carriers that pool their resources to provide single-line deliveries across the U.S. and Canada.

Fishers Finery doesn’t happen to be one of those shippers. In fact, the New London, Conn.-based manufacturer and online retailer of ecologically friendly clothing, jewelry, bedding, and lifestyle items doesn’t use Averitt’s trucks for its customer deliveries. Yet for the rest of its products’ journey from eight overseas factories—seven in China and one in Italy—to customers across the U.S., Averitt has become indispensable.

At the heart of Averitt’s value proposition is a service
that few truckers offer: warehouse space embedded in
its terminals. Though carriers sometimes provide ware-
housing and DC capacity at locations apart from their
terminals, it is unusual to carve out warehouse space within
them. At Averitt, this means using all available space—
which will include its trailers—should capacity inside its
85 terminals get tight, according to Phil Pierce, execu-
tive vice president, sales and marketing for the privately
held Cookeville, Tenn.-based company. Capacity in each
terminal will vary, Pierce said.
Shippers are not required to sign a contract to use the
common warehouse space. However, Averitt requires a
legal time commitment to utilize its seven contract ware-
houses, which are separate from the in-terminal locations,
Pierce said. Fishers uses Averitt’s common warehouse
space.
For Fishers, a four-year-old company growing at a
100-percent annualized rate but still watching every dollar
that goes out the door, the Averitt service has been a solid
fit, according to Craig Barnell, Fishers’ co-founder. E-tailer
Amazon.com Inc.’s “Fulfillment by Amazon” (FBA) ser-
vice, which Fishers uses exclusively for its direct-to-cus-
tomer fulfillment, has warehousing capabilities. However,
the warehouse fees are generally uncompetitive, mostly
because Amazon’s process isn’t structured to store goods
by case-packs, which is how Fishers wants to receive them
for fulfillment. Storing by the case-pack requires a different
racking system and operational footprint, and it doesn’t
mix well with Seattle-based Amazon’s standard retail fulfill-
ment process, according to Barnell. Amazon “doesn’t want
to be a Fishers Finery warehouse,” he said.