Diversifying Carriers Saved a Health and Wellness Brand Over $2M

Shifting to a dual-carrier strategy

For years, a top healthcare company moved nearly all of its parcel volume through a single national carrier. Transportation costs kept climbing, and their negotiating leverage kept declining. Its logistics team decided it wanted more out of its network than one contract could give it. Working with Loop, the company built a dual-carrier strategy that unlocked more than $2 million in new estimated annual savings and put it in a stronger position for every negotiation ahead.

Locked into one carrier, losing ground every renewal

For years, the company relied on a single-carrier sourcing model for its parcel network, a structure that had worked fine when rates were stable. As costs rose, that same structure boxed the company in. With almost all of its volume tied to one carrier, the company had no credible alternative to point to in negotiations and no way to signal it would walk if terms didn't improve. Each renewal became a conversation where they had little power to negotiate for better terms.

Rather than wait for the next cycle to squeeze it further, the company's logistics team decided to change the dynamic before it had to.

Why carrier carrier contracts got harder to win

Using a single-carrier parcel network is common; it’s easy to manage and simplifies operations. Since the pandemic, carrier pricing has gotten harder for shippers to read and even harder to negotiate against. General rate increases now arrive layered on top of expanded peak and demand surcharges, dimensional pricing rules that reclassify packages without notice, and discount structures that shift based on thresholds a shipper may not be tracking in real time. 

As the complexity and frequency of changes has increased, anyone with a contract signed or not significantly changed from two or more years ago faces a severe disadvantage. These older contracts often no longer reflect how a carrier bills, and shippers who show up to the table with only their own invoice history are negotiating from a position they can't fully see.

Loop's approach is to give shippers that visibility before the negotiation starts. For this healthcare company, Loop broke down their cost structure across surcharges and minimums, weight and dimensional pricing, service mix, zones and lanes, and discount mechanics, then modeled how a proposed change to any one of those terms would move cost against historical shipping data. That turned a negotiation into a data-backed conversation instead of a guessing game or a meeting full of unsupported asks.

A credible backup carrier changes the negotiation

Loop worked with the company to build the case for diversifying its network, bringing in a second major carrier to take on the majority of its e-commerce volume alongside its existing national carrier. That meant modeling what the split in volume would do to cost and service levels, building a negotiating position grounded in the company's own shipping data, and running structured talks with both carriers at once instead of one at a time.

Once a credible second carrier was in place and able to absorb real volume, the existing carrier could no longer assume the account was locked up. For the first time in years, the company walked into a negotiation with options instead of one locked-in relationship.

Diversification drives flexibility and real savings

The outcomes for the healthcare company were immediately measurable by estimating future costs based on historical shipment trends. Key results included:

• More than $2 million in new estimated annual savings, unlocked by shifting from single-carrier to dual-carrier parcel sourcing
• Stronger position for future negotiations, with clear visibility into shipment volumes, costs, and the impact of any current or future changes in fees or rates. 
• A standing structural advantage heading into every future renewal, not a one-time concession

Carrier strategy becomes a year-round practice

The company's transportation and sourcing leaders have said they valued having Loop's team prepare them for negotiations, both in restructuring the existing carrier agreement and in standing up the new one. That rich data insights and hands-on support is what made the diversification feel achievable rather than risky.

With a dual-carrier parcel network in place, the company is looking at where else that same strategic lens could apply, including the freight it manages outside of parcel. For a company that spent years locked into one set of terms, the bigger shift is treating carrier strategy as an ongoing discipline, managed year-round instead of only at renewal.