A plush pendant costing tens of yuan, due to the collective support of the fan community, sales exceeded 11 million yuan in 24 hours, and the cumulative sales approached 20 million - this is a "rich and rich" growth achieved by a trendy toy brand with the help of celebrity CP traffic. At the same time, after a table tennis player became the spokesperson for a certain milk tea brand, sales in offline supermarkets surged four times month-on-month. Some fans drove 26 kilometers just to buy 45 cups of milk tea. In another case, on the first day when a trendy toy brand signed an endorsement contract with an artist, its omni-channel sales exceeded 40 million yuan.
The explosion of traffic brought about by celebrity endorsements is becoming a sharp edge for brand growth. But the other side of the blade is the huge test that the warehousing contract fulfillment process has endured. When an official spokesperson can make the daily order volume soar from thousands to tens of thousands, and when fans' purchasing enthusiasm pours into the system in hours, whether the warehouse can catch it, send it out quickly, directly determines the final outcome of this marketing campaign.
How fierce the traffic is, how embarrassing the backend may be
Before discussing solutions, it is necessary to see the problem in its entirety.
The surge in orders caused by celebrity endorsements is essentially different from traditional e-commerce promotions. Big sales have a clear cycle and rhythm, and brands can stock up, schedule production, and lock in shipping capacity weeks in advance. However, the popularity of celebrity endorsements is often extremely sudden - on the day of the official announcement, the night of the live broadcast, or during the start of the series, the traffic may be released in a concentrated manner within a few hours. This means that brands have little buffer time to adjust warehousing resources.
Lessons from reality are not uncommon. After a beauty brand signed a spokesperson, consumers reported that the supply of related products was insufficient and some orders had to wait 30 days to be shipped. The brand had to publicly respond that it was promoting flexible supply chain management. This is not an isolated case. The trendy toy industry generally faces a strong conflict between the long cycle of IP from design to mass production and the rapid changes in market sentiment. It is very easy for a supply and demand imbalance to occur where popular products are out of stock.
The root of the problem is that the resource allocation of most brands is concentrated on the front-end of marketing, and warehousing fulfillment, as the "last mile" of the supply chain, is often not taken seriously until the explosion of orders actually occurs. Industry research data shows that the growth rate of warehouse operating costs during major promotions is often 1.5 to 2 times the sales growth rate. For sudden orders driven by celebrity endorsements, this ratio may be higher - because the costs of temporary recruitment, emergency warehouse adjustments, and expedited distribution are much higher than planned operational adjustments.
The core of advance layout: embedding elasticity into warehousing capabilities
Faced with the uncertainty of orders brought by celebrity endorsements, brands need to build elastic capabilities for warehousing and fulfillment from three dimensions.
Space flexibility and manpower flexibility must be solved simultaneously. The reaction of many brands when orders are overwhelming is to find temporary warehouses, but the expansion of physical space is only a step. The bigger challenge is whether the staffing in picking, packing, and shipping can keep up. Mature fulfillment warehouse service providers usually adopt a "fixed team + flexible employment" model, through "old and new" group operations and multi-shift emergency echelons to cope with peak pressure. SF Express's practice during the Double Eleven period also confirms this point: the elastic warehousing network provides buffer space that can be activated on demand, and cooperates with the certified elastic manpower pool and precise job planning to ensure that the warehouse does not burst and the manpower is continuously unavailable.
The system capability determines the upper limit of the peak value. When millions of orders pour into the warehouse at the same time, it is obviously unrealistic to rely on manual judgment to allocate picking tasks. AI intelligent "wave creation" technology can automatically optimize wave rules based on order structure, resource availability and storage location distribution, and take out the same or closely located goods in multiple orders at one time, significantly reducing the number of bulk order processing. This kind of system-level scheduling capability is difficult for small teams that build their own warehouses to replicate independently.
Return performance cannot be ignored either. Among fan consumption brought about by celebrity endorsements, impulse purchases account for a relatively high proportion, and the return rate is often higher than the daily level. If the return processing process is slow, it will not only affect the capital turnover, but also cause confusion in the inventory data. Efficient returns processing should achieve rapid registration, unpacking, quality inspection and system entry, so that products that can be resold are put back on the shelves as soon as possible.
Baoshi Fulfillment: Let warehousing performance become the growth support of the brand
On the path of arranging warehousing flexibility in advance, choosing a professional fulfillment warehouse service provider with a deep understanding of brand needs is a pragmatic choice.
Baoshi Fulfillment has been deeply involved in the field of smart warehousing for more than ten years. It is headquartered in Songjiang, Shanghai, and has four major directly operated warehouses in East China, with a total storage area of more than 100,000 square meters. Its self-developed SWMS smart warehousing management system and WCS smart dispatching system connect the full link data of inventory, orders, and logistics to achieve automatic order allocation and dynamic inventory management.
In view of the sudden burst of orders common for celebrity-endorsed brands, Baoshi Fulfillment's goods-to-person smart warehouse can manage massive SKUs and daily average orders, and its personnel efficiency is improved several times compared with the traditional model, and it can flexibly cope with business peaks. In the important category of celebrity derivatives, namely cultural and creative peripherals, Baoshi Fulfillment has accumulated targeted practical experience: small goods are stored in partitions on partition shelves to achieve precise positioning of single products, independent protective warehouse areas for figurines and acrylic products are set up to implement differentiated packaging standards, and all goods are connected to the digital management system to implement one-object-one-code control. Brands can access real-time inventory and sales data at any time through mobile terminals.
In terms of fulfillment timeliness, under the normal operation of Baoshi Fulfillment, orders pushed to the warehouse before 17:00 every day can be shipped out on the same day, the delivery error rate is controlled within one ten thousandth, and the inventory and picking accuracy rate is stable at more than 99.99%. At present, it has served more than 500 domestic and foreign companies, and has accumulated rich experience in warehouse building and operations in categories such as shoes and clothing, cultural and creative products, beauty, and 3C digital.
For brands that are planning celebrity endorsement cooperation, a principle worth referring to is: the decision-making of signing spokespersons and the evaluation of warehousing performance capabilities should be started simultaneously. If you try to implement a warehousing and distribution plan when the traffic comes, you will often have missed the better window period. Only by incorporating warehousing flexibility into marketing planning can every wave of orders brought by endorsements be transformed into real brand assets.
