Before shipping with Flock Freight, Dollar Shave Club was testing new carriers. The company was searching for an attentive, always-on customer service team, on-demand data and analysis, and another way to reduce its carbon footprint.
“We were preparing for a transition because we wanted to ensure we were receiving competitive pricing,” says Ryan Wuerz, fulfillment warehouse manager at Dollar Shave Club. He adds, “We also wanted to find a solution with 100% on-time, in-full performance and a damage-free rate of 99%.”
The standard less-than truckload (LTL) method, which uses the hub-and-spoke model, zigzags shipments between hubs and terminals during transit, increasing:
- Handling (and damage as a result)
- The probability of delays
- Greenhouse gas emissions
Because the hub-and-spoke model works best for smaller shipments, the LTL mode has stringent size constraints. To avoid paying higher costs for LTL service that accommodates larger loads, shippers — like Dollar Shave Club — with freight that exceeds size constraints often end up buying truckload (TL) service.
Here’s the problem: The average utilization of freight trucks that haul TL shipments is only 66%. That’s equivalent to five out of every 100 truckloads moving empty. This inefficient use of resources significantly impacts shippers’ bottom lines; shippers that don’t have enough freight to fill an entire truck pay an estimated $7 billion every year to ship air. Plus, moving underutilized trucks leads to unnecessary fuel emissions. To summarize, the LTL and TL modes waste shippers’ resources and cause undue environmental harm.
Dollar Shave Club discovered a better option: shared truckload service. While existing shipping methods don’t know how to handle Dollar Shave Club’s loads, Flock Freight’s shared truckload solution, FlockDirect, is built for them.