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Tidalwave Print & Fulfillment operates out of a 40,000-square-foot facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Specialized in screen printing, direct-to-garment printing, and custom engraving, Tidalwave is also a full-service 3PL, recently ranked in the top 1% of the INC 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America.
Getting there was not straightforward.
Tidalwave was running its warehouse on ShipStation. It worked fine at smaller volumes. At scale, it fell apart.
The first crack was inventory visibility. "The main problem was we didn't have a great way of managing our inventory and knowing where things were," said Matt Schroeder, co-founder of Tidalwave. Without location-level tracking, picking was inefficient and the risk of overselling was constant.
The second crack was client communication. eCommerce clients make last-minute order changes, address updates, holds, and cancellations as a matter of routine. With no self-service portal, every single request had to go through Tidalwave's team manually. "That piled up day after day, where we couldn't ship orders until those things got done," Schroeder recalled. "It caused huge delays in our shipping, and it was kind of a nightmare situation."
The team was running an $8 million business through a tool that was never built for what they were trying to do.
After Q4, Tidalwave made the call. "We realized that we need something different, and ShipHero was sort of top of mind of what we were going to switch to," said Schroeder.
They chose ShipHero because it was built specifically for high-volume eCommerce and 3PL fulfillment, not adapted from a simpler order management tool.
"ShipHero provides every tool along the way to build out a system that allows you to scale and grow without the worry that you're going to outgrow your software."
Matt Schroeder, Co-Founder, Tidalwave Print & Fulfillment
Tidalwave now processes over 100,000 orders per month and continues to grow. The infrastructure they are running on is designed to handle the same level of control and accuracy at 1,000,000 orders per month as it does today.
The transition required onboarding and retraining, but the interface is built for warehouse teams, not software engineers. New staff get up to speed quickly, and the client onboarding process that used to take weeks now takes one to two days. The short-term adjustment is a fraction of the cost of staying on the wrong system.
Yes, and that is part of what solved the bottleneck. ShipHero's client portal lets brand clients manage their own orders, make edits, and place holds without contacting Tidalwave's team. It removes a major source of operational drag for the 3PL.
Yes. Tidalwave relies on the Shopify integration to keep inventory data accurate across their warehouse and their clients' storefronts. When inventory moves in the warehouse, it reflects in Shopify automatically.
Schroeder addressed this directly: ShipHero's infrastructure is built to scale from 10,000 to 1,000,000 orders per month without loss of control or accuracy. The system does not require a platform change at each growth milestone.
No. ShipHero works for 3PLs at various stages of growth. What Tidalwave's story illustrates is what happens when a growing operation waits too long to make the switch. The right time to move to a purpose-built WMS is before peak season breaks you, not after.
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Tidalwave Print & Fulfillment operates out of a 40,000-square-foot facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Specialized in screen printing, direct-to-garment printing, and custom engraving, Tidalwave is also a full-service 3PL, recently ranked in the top 1% of the INC 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America.
Getting there was not straightforward.
Tidalwave was running its warehouse on ShipStation. It worked fine at smaller volumes. At scale, it fell apart.
The first crack was inventory visibility. "The main problem was we didn't have a great way of managing our inventory and knowing where things were," said Matt Schroeder, co-founder of Tidalwave. Without location-level tracking, picking was inefficient and the risk of overselling was constant.
The second crack was client communication. eCommerce clients make last-minute order changes, address updates, holds, and cancellations as a matter of routine. With no self-service portal, every single request had to go through Tidalwave's team manually. "That piled up day after day, where we couldn't ship orders until those things got done," Schroeder recalled. "It caused huge delays in our shipping, and it was kind of a nightmare situation."
The team was running an $8 million business through a tool that was never built for what they were trying to do.
After Q4, Tidalwave made the call. "We realized that we need something different, and ShipHero was sort of top of mind of what we were going to switch to," said Schroeder.
They chose ShipHero because it was built specifically for high-volume eCommerce and 3PL fulfillment, not adapted from a simpler order management tool.
"ShipHero provides every tool along the way to build out a system that allows you to scale and grow without the worry that you're going to outgrow your software."
Matt Schroeder, Co-Founder, Tidalwave Print & Fulfillment
Tidalwave now processes over 100,000 orders per month and continues to grow. The infrastructure they are running on is designed to handle the same level of control and accuracy at 1,000,000 orders per month as it does today.
The transition required onboarding and retraining, but the interface is built for warehouse teams, not software engineers. New staff get up to speed quickly, and the client onboarding process that used to take weeks now takes one to two days. The short-term adjustment is a fraction of the cost of staying on the wrong system.
Yes, and that is part of what solved the bottleneck. ShipHero's client portal lets brand clients manage their own orders, make edits, and place holds without contacting Tidalwave's team. It removes a major source of operational drag for the 3PL.
Yes. Tidalwave relies on the Shopify integration to keep inventory data accurate across their warehouse and their clients' storefronts. When inventory moves in the warehouse, it reflects in Shopify automatically.
Schroeder addressed this directly: ShipHero's infrastructure is built to scale from 10,000 to 1,000,000 orders per month without loss of control or accuracy. The system does not require a platform change at each growth milestone.
No. ShipHero works for 3PLs at various stages of growth. What Tidalwave's story illustrates is what happens when a growing operation waits too long to make the switch. The right time to move to a purpose-built WMS is before peak season breaks you, not after.
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A fast-growing 3PL outgrew spreadsheets and a rigid legacy WMS. Learn how switching to ShipHero unlocked same-day shipping speed, real-time client visibility, and 30-to-60-minute staff onboarding.
Frankly Fulfillment was built by an e-commerce veteran who understood fulfillment from the merchant side. But as order volume climbed, the tools holding operations together â spreadsheets, pen and paper, ShipStation â became the biggest obstacle to growth.
The core problem wasn't just inefficiency. The existing warehouse management system was architecturally incapable of handling the realities of a growing 3PL operation.
No real scalability. Spreadsheets and basic shipping tools were never designed for multi-client, high-volume 3PL workflows.
Locked orders. The previous WMS locked orders on receipt. Editing or canceling required manual phone and email support â a constant drain on staff.
Fulfillment errors. Missing items from totes were a recurring issue, forcing packers to stop mid-workflow to investigate discrepancies.
Vendor lock-in. Their previous provider charged extra for reports, API access, and new features â a "my way or the highway" model that penalized growth.
"The astronomical benefit of using a WMS built by people who actually understand warehouse procedures â that's what we were missing."â Founder, Frankly Fulfillment
The decision came down to one thing: partnership over transactions. Where the previous vendor charged for every feature and resisted customization, ShipHero's model was built around helping 3PLs grow.
Despite a tight transition window caused by an ending contract, the ShipHero onboarding team facilitated a smooth migration. Shipping speeds and order processing volumes improved immediately after go-live, driven by a more intuitive UI and smarter picking and batching logic.
Since implementing ShipHero, Frankly Fulfillment scaled from near zero to approximately 65,000 orders per month. But the impact goes beyond volume.
KPI visibility. The warehouse now tracks brand storage utilization, order profitability, and individual picker and packer speeds â metrics that were invisible before.
Client self-service. Clients can directly manage their inventory and orders in real time â no support tickets, no phone calls to cancel an order.
Flexible shipping logic. Rate Shop Plus supports nuanced rules that match the complexity of running multiple client accounts at scale.
Labor efficiency. Color-coded picking racks and intuitive iPad workflows reduce training time and picking errors across the warehouse floor.
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Top Operator (TOP), a national 3PL with 7 locations, partnered with High-Volume Brand (HVB) to optimize fulfillment for a rapidly scaling product line. By implementing ShipHeroâs Direct Pack-to-Light technology, the operator proved that a single warehouse station can handle massive volume. The result was a sustained average of 253 items per hour and a peak throughput of 555 items per hour, allowing the 3PL to centralize inventory and manage 1.1 million projected annual orders without bottlenecks.
HVB did not face an overnight crisis, but rather the compounding pressure of sustained success. Their order volume nearly doubled in two years, creating a complex logistical hurdle:
As the brand grew, TOP faced a choice: continue fracturing inventory across multiple warehouses to handle the load, or find a technology that could process the entire volume from a single hub.
In previous years, the 3PL attempted to manage peaks by splitting inventory among different warehouses. According to the 3PLâs Key Accounts Director, this was ânot a good idea,â as it added complexity and reduced efficiency.
To solve this, TOP deployed ShipHeroâs Direct Pack-to-Light. This system uses visual cues to automate decision-making at the packing station, allowing a single facility to handle the throughput that previously required a multi-node network.
âPack-to-Light was undoubtedly a game changer; it allowed us to handle the entire projected peak volume from a single facility, whereas in previous years, we had tried splitting the inventory among different warehouses. This clientâs order profile and product mix are a perfect fit for this flow.â
â Key Accounts Director, Top Operator (TOP)
To achieve this level of centralization and speed, the 3PL utilized a dual-feature strategy. The concept of âDirect Pack-to-Lightâ combines two distinct ShipHero capabilities into a unified, high-velocity workflow:
By combining the structural efficiency of the Direct Pack Station with the visual speed of Pack-to-Light Technology, the operator removed cognitive load from the packers, allowing for âfollow-the-lightâ simplicity even with complex orders.
TOP relied on this combined technology to successfully meet the brandâs throughput needs. To ensure the case study relied on accurate production capabilities rather than theoretical estimates, the operations team analyzed performance using â5-minute active blocksâ to filter out idle time.
The warehouse shattered its previous manual baselines established during the 2023 peak season:
The data highlights that the system maintained high velocity even when handling âmassive ordersâ. Typically, large orders with high line counts create bottlenecks at the label printer, but the Pack-to-Light workflow mitigated this, allowing for continuous flow even during complex packing scenarios.
While speed is the primary metric, the 3PLâs leadership identified two critical indirect benefits that brought immense value to the business structure:
For HVB, the partnership with TOP provided stability during critical growth phases. As noted by the Key Accounts Director, the brand has âfound a solid partner... one that covers the market effectively by providing great shipping service.â
By moving from manual processing to Direct Pack-to-Light, the 3PL successfully maintained system integration and on-time accuracy for a volume of 1.1 million orders, proving that the right tech stack allows brands to scale without fracturing their inventory operations.
Disclaimer:The companies featured in this case study requested anonymity for competitive reasons. âTop Operator (TOP)â and âHigh-Volume Brand (HVB)â are placeholders used to represent the parties involved; however, all throughput metrics and operational results presented are factual and verified based on actual warehouse performance data.
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