Moving Fulfillment to DHL Ahead of the Black Friday Preview

A skincare brand was shipping D2C and B2B orders from one facility and needed to move both channels to DHL Supply Chain’s Rialto site. Its Black Friday Preview opened Oct 20, with about 9,800 US orders expected over four days. The new site had to be stable before then.

Every SKU, open order and inbound purchase order had to point at the new building while orders kept shipping from the old one. Transfers were capped at about 2 trucks a day. D2C can’t pick until inventory is fully put away. About 10 heat-sensitive formulas had to stay on lower racks. The brand’s order logic also had to work on day one: virtual bundles, orders that flip between channels, Shopify promotions, Canada shipping and custom inserts.

Our Approach

We cut over one channel at a time. Inbound went live Oct 5, D2C on Oct 12 and B2B on Oct 19. D2C went first because customers feel it right away, and it gave the team a week of live data before retail orders started. B2B waited until DHL confirmed it was ready to pick.

We tested with the brand’s own scenarios. We started from the UAT scripts we used on an earlier brand move, then added theirs: bundles, order flipping, Shopify promotions, finance controls and Canada. On Oct 9, four smoke-test orders ran through production, including a Canada shipment and a cancellation.

We kept four teams on one calendar. The brand, DHL, the freight carrier and the integration team met on a fixed rhythm: a weekly internal call, a Wednesday inventory plan call, a Thursday go/no-go call, and daily hypercare calls from Oct 5 through the B2B launch. A one-page weekly status listed the top risks with owners, and every cutover step had a named owner.

We moved inventory in priority order. The brand’s supply planning team ranked transfer orders 1, 2 and 3, and each week we sent DHL a short written summary of the top-priority orders. A shared tracker let DHL confirm picks and flag shortages. The carrier staged trailers at both sites for drop-and-hook and planned 3 to 4 loads a day. Finance took timestamped inventory snapshots before transfers began, and 100+ open purchase orders were re-pointed to Rialto.

The Outcome

• Rialto received about 19 transfer loads in its first week. Every unit shipped from the old facility was received and reconciled at 100%.
• D2C went live Oct 12 with no disruption for customers. By midday on day one, DHL had about 530 orders in hand and had shipped 185, all on track to ship within SLA.
• B2B opened on schedule Oct 19. DHL confirmed pick readiness, the first order batch reached DHL that morning, and no orders were lost during the held window.
• Canada shipping setup, receipt matching and SKU alerts all surfaced in the first week. Each was closed within a day.
• The brand held every date it reset in September. D2C, B2B and inbound were all running from Rialto going into the Oct 20 Black Friday Preview.

Izba helped the brand get to DHL Rialto before its busiest weeks of the year.