When it comes to launches, timing isn’t just a detail, it’s the difference between delighting customers and damaging trust. At Ace Fulfilment, we’ve built our whole operation around getting that timing right every single time.
If I had a pound for every time a carton had come out of China mislabelled, I’d be writing this blog post from the deck of my yacht, sipping Vintage 2013 Dom Pérignon. Instead, I’m here writing this, because apparently, this industry still hasn’t figured out how to deal with a box that says “20 small hoodies” when it actually contains 19.
And here’s the thing: it’s not hard. Fulfilment centres should be built to handle this. But instead, they act like one mixed-SKU carton has brought their entire operation to its knees. They’ll delay your goods in, charge you extra for the “inconvenience,” and spin you a story about how their whole team needed a mental health walkout because of one mislabelled box. It’s mind-boggling. Just get the job done.
We’ve heard it all: “Oh, those end-of-production mixed boxes are a nightmare.” “Oh, the cartons were labelled wrong.” Spare me. This happens constantly, and any fulfilment centre worth its salt should be prepared to deal with it. Quickly.
At Ace Fulfilment, we got tired of the excuses. So we worked with our product development team at Acifin for, frankly, about five minutes to develop a solution: RFID care labels applied at the fabric stage. That means no matter what the carton says, or even what the packaging barcode says, we can identify every single garment instantly with an RFID scanner.
Many big fulfilment centres hear “RFID” and go into panic mode. “It’ll never work,” they say. Well, it does. And the proof is in the pudding, not referring to the cake I was handing out to the team on Friday when they finished dispatch in record time, I'm referring to the work we’re doing with RFID to verify goods the second they hit our dock.
I can walk around a pallet of boxes and, in seconds, get a complete count of every SKU inside. No opening boxes. No manual scanning. No delays. And if we’re short on a certain SKU, we switch the scanner to find mode — it literally points us toward the missing item like a game of hot and cold. We could even use RFID at the dispatch level to skip barcode scanning entirely. (If Decathlon lets customers use it in-store, your warehouse can use it too.)
Let me show you how this works in practice. On Friday, we received a 20ft container: half for Childish, which needed immediate dispatch (job done, cake served), and half for STORROR — their blanks for upcoming collections.
We split the goods into two areas: one for blanks going straight to their 3PL, and one for blanks headed to print. Before opening a single box, we'll run an RFID scan. In seconds, we had a full SKU breakdown. No surprises, no manual counting.
Then we opened boxes only when necessary, either to verify barcode accuracy or re-label if needed. Once everything is confirmed, we will generate a complete packing list and ensure every carton is correctly marked with exactly what’s inside. The result? A seamless handoff to their 3PL with zero goods-in issues.
This isn’t rocket science. Yet too many warehouses act like they only have two options: blindly trust the carton label, or painfully open and scan every item by hand. There’s a third option: embrace technology and make your life easier.
Mislabelled cartons are not a catastrophe, they’re a reality of global production. The question is whether your fulfilment centre is going to keep making excuses, or whether they’ll invest in tools like RFID to make the problem irrelevant, and educate you on how you can easily incorporate it into your supply chain.
We chose the latter. And it’s why our clients’ stock moves faster, their goods-in is cleaner, and their launches go smoother. Because at Ace Fulfilment, we don’t stop when a box surprises us — we keep the operation moving.
