Industry insider: Interview with 3PL Lexington Logistics Founder

Step inside the world between clicking ‘buy now’ and unboxing, with this 3PL providing bespoke services to emerging and boutique lifestyle brands to bridge the gap between purchase and delivery.

The world of logistics is a unique perspective of the fashion industry. The often unknown “grey area” between clicking ‘buy now’ and the moment you get a notification to check the door for your delivery!

For one team, this little-known grey area is lit by neon sign perched above an entranceway flanked by racks of ruffles, sequins and prints, with an adorable pug padding along the carpet in a custom-made high-vis vest. Welcome to Lexington Logistics.

Lexington Logistics provides white glove pick, pack, and fulfillment services to a range of emerging and boutique brands, allowing them to take the next step in building and expanding their business — and they do it with style.

Meet Deanne Luke, founder of Lexington Logistics, one of Australia's leading white glove 3PLs — delivering bespoke pick, pack, and fulfillment services from the heart of Brisbane.

Deanne’s story started in the fashion industry, as a business consultant, providing advice and business support for many years before identifying a gap in the market. That grey area from purchase to product delivery, and specifically, how to help emerging brands to make the jump from boxing orders in their living room, to outsourcing logistics completely.

“Our focus is to provide exceptional quality and responsive logistics services and warehouse solutions to small or boutique brands and start-ups,” said Luke.

“We treat each of our brands like they were our own and take care when looking after your products from warehousing through to pick, pack and distribution. Your brand and product is your image and we want to ensure that we are an extension of your business not a separate entity.”

This is no metaphor, Luke explains. Indeed, the first step they take when bringing on any new customer is to ensure they are set up in Lexington’s WMS system, CartonCloud. This ensures online ordering is integrated directly from the shopfront into the warehouse system, that custom packaging can be selected and fulfilled, and so that the customer has full access to view order processing, inventory levels and stock reports directly from their own online dashboard.

“We work with brands that we absolutely love, and that we want to be around,” she said.
“It’s something that is really important to us, that we aren’t a complete third party, we part of their integrated process and an extension to their operation.

“To hand over your brand to a third party is a big thing and we want to make sure that we can actually uphold their values, their brand messaging, their key themes to be able to then ship out their product exactly the same way they would in-house.”

Providing outsourced logistics services for omnichannel and e-commerce clients requires effective software integrations for online ordering, and this is one of the key areas they rely on their WMS software, to enable them to provide exceptional service to their customers.

“When we onboard a client, the first part of that is to ensure we have CartonCloud set up, to ensure their integration is spot on. Once we have everything connected, [our customers] actually don’t need to touch what we do or how it operates — we’re able to integrate our systems together to a complete, autonomous process.

To simplify processes even further for their customers, Lexington also provide access for each customer into their WMS system, from a secure customer dashboard, where they can see orders, track fulfillment and manage stock levels directly, 24/7.

“It brings them closer together,” she said. “They don’t feel that they are completely separated from their brand and the transparency is there, so they can see stock levels in the warehouse, and the orders that are being placed and processed.

“For us, to take them on board and see them flourish, and actually start to do 20, 30, up to 100 orders a day — that’s why we do the work that we do.”

Want to know more? Listen to Deanne Luke’s Podcast Delivering Joy interviewing industry leaders to explore how brands are going above and beyond to deliver joy to customers or find Lexington Logistics online.
Visit www.cartoncloud.com to learn more about their easy-to-use, integrated WMS/TMS that allows 3PLs to do more for their customers.

About CartonCloud:

CartonCloud provides logistics software, built by logistics people. Their powerful, cloud-based integrated WMS/TMS software enables small-medium logistics businesses to streamline workflows, automate data and grow their business.