Loop finds $3.8M in addressable parcel savings for a leading outdoor goods brand

Outdoor goods is a category defined by complexity. Products range from ultralight trail accessories to oversized hardgoods, kayaks, camping equipment, and more—each with its own dimensional profile, weight class, and delivery requirement. For brands that sell across direct-to-consumer (DTC) and wholesale channels at scale, that complexity flows directly into the parcel network. No two shipments look alike, and the carriers, service levels, and rate structures required to move them efficiently reflect that complexity. 

This leading outdoor goods retailer built a loyal customer following based on the speed and reliability of every delivery, no matter how complex the order. With $27M in annual parcel spend and a product catalog that pushed the limits of standard parcel rate structures, their logistics operation had grown into a sophisticated, multi-carrier network. Six carriers. Multiple service tiers. Contracts renewed on different cycles, managed by different teams, with no shared framework for measuring performance or competitiveness. For a business where shipping is a significant cost driver, that fragmentation was adding up. 

The challenge: Six carriers, six silos, and no way to see the full picture

Managing one carrier contract is demanding. Managing six, independently, without a common framework, and without visibility into how they perform relative to each other or the market, is a different problem entirely. That was the operational reality this brand's logistics team endured every day.

Each carrier relationship had its own history, its own discount structure, and its own renewal timeline. Rate cards had been negotiated at different points in time, under different market conditions, and never with a full view of the brand's actual shipping profile. Over two contract cycles, total parcel costs had climbed 18% with no corresponding improvement in service. The team suspected they were overpaying, but had no experience or insights to confirm it or to quantify the gap.

The product catalog made the problem tougher. Lightweight accessories and oversized hardgoods move through the network very differently, and standard rate structures rarely account for that kind of product mix. Without rates optimized for their oversized shipping profile, the brand was paying extra on every shipment without realizing it. 

Heading into renewal season across multiple carriers simultaneously, the team faced a familiar but urgent set of problems: 

• Six-carrier environment managed in silos with no cross-carrier visibility into cost, performance, or competitiveness
• Rate structures not optimized for the brand's oversize and DIM-heavy shipping profile
• No consistent framework for evaluating rate performance or measuring discounts against current market conditions
• Carrier renewals handled reactively, limiting the team's preparation time and negotiating leverage

Without a unified view, prioritizing carrier and contract opportunities was nearly impossible. Carrier performance gaps, contract opportunities, and renewal priorities were all evaluated independently, forcing every negotiation to start from scratch.

The solution: One view across the entire carrier portfolio

The brand partnered with Loop to do what their team couldn’t do alone: unify all six carrier relationships into a single source of intelligence and build a data-backed strategy for optimizing each one.

Loop ingested the brand's complete contract portfolio and shipping history across all six carriers, automatically mapping every charge back to the rate structure governing it and evaluating each against current market conditions. Within days, the team had something they'd never had before: one dashboard showing rate performance across all six carriers, broken down by service type, zone, and package characteristics. For the first time, they had complete visibility across their entire network. 

The platform and Loop's expert team delivered three things that changed how the brand approached every carrier conversation:

• A unified AI dashboard surfaced cross-carrier cost performance and gaps, showing exactly where each carrier was underperforming and how the brand's oversize and DIM-heavy profile was driving unnecessary cost.
• What-if scenario and mix modeling quantified the financial impact of reshaping service and carrier mix, not against hypothetical volume forecasts, but against the brand's actual shipping data. For the first time, every proposed change had a modeled dollar value attached to it.
• A prioritized expert negotiation roadmap sequenced by savings opportunity and carrier relationship dynamics, giving the team a clear order of operations and specific rate targets for each carrier conversation.

The result wasn't just better data. It was a fundamentally different negotiating posture, one grounded in independent intelligence rather than carrier-provided information.

The results: $3.8M in addressable savings and a new way to manage a complex carrier portfolio

Within eleven weeks, the team had identified $3.8M in addressable savings across all six carriers and locked in a 14.1% blended rate reduction, without disrupting existing service levels or carrier relationships. What had seemed like an unmanageable tangle of independent contracts turned out to be a single, solvable problem once the right intelligence was applied to it.

• $3.8M addressable savings identified 
• 14.1% blended rate reduction 
• 6 carriers optimized in one view 
• 11 weeks time to ROI

The bigger shift was structural. A multi-carrier environment that had been managed reactively, in silos, with no common framework, became something the team could actively optimize. Carrier performance is now assessed consistently. Renewal cycles are planned ahead of time and the negotiating leverage that comes from knowing exactly what you should be paying, across all six carriers simultaneously, doesn't go away between contracts.

"Loop gave us the cross-carrier view we never had. For the first time, we walked into carrier discussions knowing exactly what we should be paying and why." — Senior Director, Transportation & Logistics

Looking ahead: From renewal cycle to continuous optimization

Managing six carriers doesn't get simpler over time. Catalogs evolve, volumes shift, and the market moves whether you're watching or not. The brands that win on shipping costs aren't the ones that negotiate well every two years, they're the ones that never stop optimizing.

That's what Loop makes possible. With continuous monitoring across all six carriers, this outdoor goods brand now has real-time visibility into how their contracts are performing, where the market has moved, and which opportunities are worth acting on. The next negotiation won't start from scratch. It will start from a position of strength, backed by two years of continuous intelligence rather than a last-minute scramble.

Six carriers is a lot to manage. With Loop, it's finally under control.