Audio reader
How healthy is your fulfilment setup?
Answer 10 quick questions to get your % health score and tips on how to improve.
Take the quizIf your fashion brand is scaling fast, fulfilment is often the first place where cracks begin to show. What once worked with a single warehouse, a handful of markets and manageable order volumes quickly becomes a bottleneck as international demand, delivery expectations and returns volumes increase.
One thing's for sure: fulfilment is no longer just a back-office function for ambitious brands in the fashion space. It's a defining part of how businesses scale, compete and protect margins.
The brands that grow fastest won't just ship products fastest, but build a fulfilment operation that's flexible, global and designed around modern customer expectations in fashion eCommerce.
Fashion fulfilment services are about much more than just picking, packing and getting orders from A to B.
As a top-level summary, modern fulfilment services provide an operational backbone that fashion brands lean on to sell, deliver and return products across multiple channels and markets. To do so, setups include warehousing, order processing, shipping and returns, with more advanced operations including technology, integrations, real-time inventory visibility and international potential.
Unlike some other eCommerce fulfilment setups, fashion fulfilment must support high SKU complexity, seasonal demand shifts, fast product cycles and a customer experience where delivery and returns are a key part of the brand promise.
In short, fashion fulfilment services actively contribute to the growth of the brand, allowing for easy scaling across channels and regions.
Fashion brands don't always scale in the same way as other eCommerce businesses, as just one product launch can create several SKU variants across sizes, colours and regions. Not only this, but demand can be unpredictable, seasonality is intense and a good returns process is an expectation.
Fashion customers are also increasingly global. Even if you're headquartered in the UK, you might manufacture overseas and sell to customers across Europe and North America. Fulfilment has to keep pace with these ambitions, or you'll outgrow your provider fast.
Fulfilment is particularly complex for fashion brands because of:
Many fulfilment models can struggle under this complexity, so many brands opt for purpose-built fashion fulfilment solutions with track records of success.
See how we supported fashion icon Ed Hardy with its post-Brexit resurgence
Not so long ago, fulfilment was seen by many as a cost to minimise. Brands focused on finding the cheapest warehouse, lowest pick-and-pack fees and fastest route to dispatch. Fast forward to today, and you often get what you pay for.
Investing more into fulfilment can protect brand reputation and customer loyalty (due to things like fast, sustainable delivery and easy, in-country returns), and also allow your brand to scale internationally when the time's right.
The most successful fashion brands treat fulfilment as a strategic capability, not an operational necessity. By doing so, they build a more resilient brand experience that makes customers happy across the globe.
As the industry matures and customers want more, the expectations of fashion fulfilment services are rising.
Fashion brands no longer have to 'rebuild' a fulfilment operation when the time comes to expand into new markets. A modern fulfilment partner should be able to support the international ambitions of a growing fashion brand without forcing them into entirely new systems or third-party providers.
Holding stock in a single location creates unwanted friction and costs. By utilising a network of fulfilment centres, brands can place stock closer to end customers through multiple warehouses worldwide.
This approach improves delivery speed, reduces shipping costs and lowers the environmental impact of long-distance delivery.
Next-day and two-daly delivery expectations can even extend beyond domestic markets. Fashion fulfilment solutions must make fast delivery achievable across borders without forcing the brand to absorb unsustainable shipping premiums.
Returns are a core challenge for fashion brands. Fashion maintains the highest return rates of any eCommerce category with a 24.4% overall return rate, rising to 27.8% in women's fashion.
Get returns wrong, and they'll eat away at profits fast. Fulfilment services should include local or regional returns hubs that provide a simple, effective customer experience and reduce return shipping distances.
Your fashion fulfilment services should integrate cleanly with the eCommerce platforms and marketplaces your brand is familiar with. You shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel when you switch provider, but instead integrate fulfilment workflows and technologies with your storefront.
Real-time syncing of orders, inventory and returns should be expected here.
Learn how we supported UK-based luxury fashion brand PHIX with its worldwide expansion
Blind spots are expensive. You'll want clear visibility over your inventory and orders, allowing you to make informed business decisions and avoid reputation-damaging out-of-stock notices.
Fashion demand isn't linear, and fulfilment services must be able to adapt. Scaling capacity up and down without locking the brand into rigid processes or long-term risk is essential, meaning flexibility is no longer optional. Capacity should be 'elastic,' whether adjusting for demand or expanding into new territories.
Sustainability is a hot topic in fashion. Figures from 2024 show that fashion alone is responsible for 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases annually, with this figure set to rise 50% by 2030. With this in mind, brands must do everything they can to be environmentally responsible.
Sustainability in fulfilment should be built into how operations are designed. Placing stock closer to customers to reduce unnecessary shipping – along with processing returns locally – contributes to lower overall emissions.
Discover more about our sustainable fulfilment business model
ASOS recently announced that UK customers with a historical return rate of 70% or higher will now be charged a £3.95 returns fee – unless they keep at least £40 worth of items from their order.
Alongside this, the eCommerce giant has introduced greater transparency, including showing customers their personal returns rate in-app, as well as improved sizing guidance, imagery and product recommendations, designed to reduce unnecessary returns in the first place.
This move matters not because of the fee itself, but because of what it represents for the future of fashion eCommerce.
Our internal data shows that return volumes can reach up to eight times the daily average during peak weeks, placing enormous pressure on fulfilment operations, inventory availability and customer service teams.
ASOS has already demonstrated that it's willing to enforce hard limits, having previously closed accounts with persistently high return rates. What’s changed now is the approach; rather than relying solely on behind-the-scenes enforcement, ASOS is moving towards tiered, data-led policies that aim to influence customer behaviour before problems escalate.
For growing fashion brands, ASOS has demonstrated where the industry could be heading. Returns strategies are no longer just a customer experience decision, but a core fulfilment and operational concern that directly affects stock availability, warehouse capacity, transport emissions and margin protection.
Brands that win with returns will use data, visibility and technology to understand why returns happen, and design fulfilment and returns operations that are fair, transparent and scalable.
In line with rising expectations, many growing fashion brands continue to make avoidable fulfilment mistakes.
Common pitfalls include:
These mistakes don’t just slow operations, but limit your brand's capability to grow quickly.
When evaluating fashion fulfilment services, growing brands should look beyond today’s requirements.
Key questions to ask include:
The right fulfilment partner should remove friction from growth, allowing your brand to scale (responsibly) beyond borders when the time comes.
Fulfilment no longer sits quietly behind the scenes.
It defines delivery speed, customer satisfaction, sustainability metrics and the ability to scale internationally with confidence. Therefore, choosing the right provider is essential.
The fashion brands that reach their potential will be the ones that recognise this shift in attitude towards fulfilment early, and partner with a provider that actively contributes to business growth, not just gets orders from A to B.
Check out our other recommendations just for you!
See all
Learn how to strengthen customer loyalty in eCommerce with these post-peak season tips. See how to improve retention with our ready-made roadmap.
Learn the key signs that it's time to switch fulfilment provider. See how a change can improve delivery performance, customer satisfaction and more.
Learn the must-track eCommerce performance metrics, benchmarks and insights to improve and maintain your fulfilment setup in 2026 and beyond.
By Ryan Johnson