Apparel distribution that keeps up with the season.

Built on the same port-to-door chain

Most apparel for the U.S. market arrives in ocean containers, and the slow, expensive part is rarely the storage — it's the handoffs. A container sits at the terminal, gets drayed to one yard, transloaded at another, then trucked to a fulfillment center across town. Every handoff is a day and a markup. Because we run drayage, warehousing and fulfillment as one operation in Kent, your spring line can come off the boat and into pickable, sellable inventory without leaving our control. One team, one invoice, from the Port of Seattle or Tacoma to the store.

Fashion warehousing is a different problem from general storage

A pallet of industrial parts sits still for a year. A clothing line does not. Fashion warehousing has to absorb a whole season arriving inside a few weeks, hold it while nothing ships, then empty out faster than it filled — and do it again for the next drop. The cost that kills apparel brands is not the rate per pallet; it is paying for peak-season racking in March.

So the storage flexes with your buy. You carry the space a season needs when it needs it, and you stop carrying it when the season sells through. Product comes in at carton level and is tracked at SKU level, because size and colour are the whole inventory question in this category — "500 units" tells a clothing brand nothing without the size run behind it. Flat-pack goes to racking; anything that has to stay on the hanger stays on the hanger.

What an apparel 3PL actually has to do

Plenty of warehouses will store clothing. Far fewer will do the parts that decide whether a season ships on time. If you are comparing a fashion warehouse or a clothing 3PL, these are the questions worth asking, of us or of anyone else:

• Can they get the container themselves? Most apparel for the U.S. arrives by ocean. If the 3PL does not run its own drayage, your season passes through a separate vendor and a separate yard first — a day and a markup per handoff, before anything is even received.
• Do they hold your retailer's routing guide? Ticketing, carton labels, ASN timing and pallet build are where big-box shipments get charged back. A compliance failure is deducted from the invoice months later.
• Can they run wholesale and DTC off one inventory? Splitting stock across two providers means you are out of stock in one channel while sitting on units in the other.
• What happens to returns? In DTC apparel a large share of what ships comes back. If returned units are not inspected and restocked quickly, they miss the season entirely and become markdown.
• Does the storage cost flex? A fixed lease sized for your peak is expensive for eight months of the year.

Footwear, accessories and the awkward SKUs

Footwear behaves differently from garments and it is worth saying out loud: deeper size runs, heavier cartons, boxes that have to arrive undamaged because the shoebox is part of the product. Accessories bring the opposite problem — small, high-count, easy to miscount. Both run through the same receiving and pick lines here, with the count done at the level the category actually needs rather than a flat carton count.

Apparel distribution FAQ

What is apparel distribution?

Apparel distribution is the 3PL handling of clothing and footwear — receiving imported product, storing it, then picking, packing and shipping it to retailers and direct-to-consumer customers, including retailer compliance and returns.

Do you handle both wholesale and direct-to-consumer apparel?

Yes — B2B/wholesale orders by case, size run or store, and DTC e-commerce orders by the unit, out of the same inventory.

Can you meet big-box retailer and Amazon requirements?

We prep to retailer routing guides — ticketing, labeling and pallet specs — and handle Amazon FBA prep for sellers going through Amazon.

Do you handle apparel imports from the port?

That's the core of it. We pull your import containers off the Seattle and Tacoma terminals and bring them straight to our Kent warehouse, so there's no separate drayage vendor in the middle.

Can you scale storage for seasonal apparel?

Yes — storage flexes with your buy, so you're not paying for empty racking in the off-season.

What is an apparel 3PL?

An apparel 3PL is a third-party logistics provider that specialises in clothing and footwear rather than general freight — receiving imported seasons, warehousing them at SKU and size level, picking for both wholesale and direct-to-consumer, meeting retailer routing guides, and processing returns fast enough that units get back on sale inside the same season.

How is fashion warehousing different from ordinary warehousing?

Volume arrives in waves rather than a steady flow, inventory is tracked by size and colour rather than by pallet, a share of what ships comes back, and the space needed at peak is several times the space needed off-season. A warehouse priced and staffed for steady pallet storage handles all four badly.

Do you work with smaller clothing brands or only large ones?

Both. The reason a smaller brand uses a 3PL at all is precisely that a lease and a crew sized for peak are unaffordable — so the smaller the brand, the more the flexible model matters.

Where are you located, and does that suit an apparel brand?

Kent, Washington, in the valley between the Port of Seattle and the Port of Tacoma. For product arriving from Asia that is the first U.S. landing point on the West Coast, which takes days off the front of the season compared with clearing further south and trucking north.