Chapter 9: The Box Truck Moment

I rented a box truck in Times Square on a weekday morning in early 2014. It was way too big for what we were moving—probably three times the size we actually needed—but I had rose-colored glasses on for the gravity of the moment.

We were moving our inventory from the TriBeCa office to a 3PL warehouse in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. In my mind, this was monumental. We were graduating from scrappy startup operation to legitimate business with professional fulfillment infrastructure. This was proof that we'd built something real.

My then-girlfriend (now wife) came with me for the drive. We loaded everything from the office—boxes of shirts, hoodies, beanies, wristbands, all the inventory that had been crowding our workspace for the past two years. It didn't come close to filling that massive truck, but it felt like we were moving an empire.

The truth is, I needed this moment. I needed the warehouse to feel like I'd earned the right to make bigger, bolder moves with the store. But I also desperately needed to get fulfillment operations out of our office and off my daily plate.

The Push and The Pull

The decision to move to a 3PL came from two equally strong forces pulling in the same direction.

The Reality: I was Chief Operating Officer of a nonprofit, not an ecommerce entrepreneur. My actual job was organizational strategy, program development, team management, and fundraising operations. But I was spending hours every week managing inventory, packing boxes, coordinating shipments, and handling fulfillment logistics.

Our TriBeCa office was getting crowded. Shelves of merchandise took up space that should have been used for program work. The conference room doubled as a packing station. When big orders came in, the whole office would shift into fulfillment mode.

More problematically, the board of directors was starting to ask questions. What was their Chief Operating Officer doing with his time? Why was so much energy going into merchandise when the organization's mission was about programs, advocacy, and community support?

Those were fair questions. The store was successful and important, but it was consuming bandwidth that should have been focused on the nonprofit's core work.

The Aspiration: But there was also this: I wanted a warehouse. I wanted the legitimacy that came with having professional fulfillment operations. I wanted to be able to say "we have a warehouse in Pennsylvania" when people asked about the store.

More than that, I felt like I needed that infrastructure in place before I could make the bigger moves I was thinking about. New product lines. Higher volume. More sophisticated inventory management. International shipping. All of that felt impossible while we were still packing boxes in our office.

The warehouse represented graduation. It meant we'd built something substantial enough to require real operational infrastructure. It was proof—to the board, to our community, to myself—that the store wasn't just a side project anymore.

The Arrival

When we pulled into Wilkes-Barre, the entire warehouse team was outside waiting for us. A few executives in shirts and ties stood there like this was a momentous occasion. Behind them, a group of warehouse workers who clearly could have cared less about this particular delivery stood around looking mildly interested.

The contrast was perfect. For the executives, this was a new client relationship beginning, a business milestone worth marking. For the floor staff, this was just another Tuesday—another company moving in, another set of boxes to handle, another set of procedures to learn.

For me, it was somewhere in between. Monumental enough that I'd rented an absurdly large truck and driven three hours to deliver what could have been shipped. Routine enough that I felt slightly ridiculous pulling up with all that empty space in the back.

But the executives greeting us outside? That felt good. It felt like they understood that this mattered, even if the actual volume of inventory we were delivering didn't warrant the ceremony.

Finding Wilkes-Barre and Building the Partnership

I don't remember exactly how we found the 3PL in Wilkes-Barre. Probably through research, referrals, and cold outreach. What mattered was that they were willing to work with a relatively small operation that was still figuring things out.

They weren't a massive fulfillment center handling millions of units for major retailers. They were a regional warehouse that had evolved with the times. Decades earlier, they'd done VCR duplication—back when that was an actual business. They'd iterated through technological shifts, adapting their operations as the market changed. Someone mentioned that the real money had been in adult content, but they'd never considered going that route.

Now they handled fulfillment for small to mid-sized operations like ours. They could accommodate our volume while giving us the kind of personal attention that larger operations wouldn't provide.

The location made sense too. Central Pennsylvania was close enough to drive to if needed, but far enough away that it felt like we were building real distribution infrastructure. It was cheaper than anything near New York. And the warehouse team seemed genuinely interested in helping us set up our operations properly.

The Box Truck Drive

The drive from Times Square to Wilkes-Barre takes about three hours if traffic cooperates. We loaded the truck in TriBeCa, navigated through Manhattan traffic in a vehicle way too big for city streets, and headed west on I-80.

I kept looking in the rearview mirror at all that empty space in the back of the truck. We could have done this with a van. Maybe even a large SUV. But something about that oversized box truck felt right. We were making a statement, even if the only people who knew about it were me, my wife, and the warehouse team waiting for us in Pennsylvania.

The drive gave me time to think about what was changing. For two years, I'd been intimately involved in every aspect of fulfillment. I knew which boxes we used for different order sizes. I'd developed a system for packing efficiently. I could estimate shipping costs without looking them up. I'd built relationships with our postal workers who picked up packages from our office.

All of that was about to become someone else's responsibility. Part of me was relieved—finally, I could focus on the parts of the business that actually required my specific skills and knowledge. Part of me was anxious—would the warehouse team care about quality and customer experience the way I did?

And part of me was just excited. This felt like leveling up. We were building something bigger than what one person could manage from an office in lower Manhattan.

Building the SOPs

Working with the warehouse team on standard operating procedures was more involved than I'd expected. They had experience with fulfillment, but every business has its own quirks, requirements, and quality standards.

We walked through the entire process together:

Receiving inventory: How products would be checked in, counted, and stored. Which items needed special handling or specific storage conditions.

Order processing: How orders would flow from our system to theirs. What information they needed. How quickly orders should be fulfilled after being received.

Packing standards: What boxes to use for different order sizes. How to pack items to prevent damage. What branded materials to include (packing slips, thank-you cards, promotional inserts).

Quality control: How to check products before shipping. What to do if items were damaged or defective. When to contact us about problems versus handling them independently.

Shipping methods: Which carriers to use for different destinations. How to handle international orders. What to do with packages that couldn't be delivered.

Returns processing: How returned items should be inspected, restocked, or discarded. What information we needed about returns and why they happened.

Creating these SOPs forced me to articulate processes that had mostly existed in my head. When you're packing boxes yourself, you develop intuitions and shortcuts that work but aren't necessarily documented. Translating that tacit knowledge into explicit procedures was harder than I'd anticipated.

But it was also valuable. Writing everything down revealed gaps in our processes and inconsistencies in how we handled different situations. The act of explaining our requirements to someone else made us better at understanding what those requirements actually were.

What Changed (And What Didn't)

The 3PL transition solved some problems immediately and revealed new ones I hadn't anticipated.

What got better:

The office felt like an office again instead of a warehouse. We had space for meetings, program work, and actual nonprofit operations. I wasn't spending hours every week packing boxes or running to the post office. When big orders came in, I didn't have to drop everything to handle fulfillment.

The board stopped asking questions about why I was spending so much time on merchandise logistics. I could focus on my actual COO responsibilities—organizational strategy, team development, fundraising operations, program management.

Fulfillment became more consistent and professional. The warehouse team had systems and processes that were more sophisticated than our office setup. Customers got their orders faster and more reliably.

What got harder:

I lost the direct connection to every order. Before, I'd pack each box knowing where it was going and who had ordered it. There was something personal about that hands-on involvement. Now, orders were just line items in a system.

Quality control became more complicated. When problems happened—wrong items shipped, damaged products, missing orders—I couldn't just walk to the packing station and see what went wrong. Everything required coordination, explanation, and trust that the warehouse team cared about quality as much as I did.

Costs increased. Paying for professional fulfillment services was more expensive than doing it ourselves in our office. The economics still made sense—my time was worth more than the cost difference—but it was a real line item in the budget that hadn't existed before.

What stayed the same:

I was still deeply involved in the store's operations, just in different ways. The 3PL handled the physical logistics, but I was still managing inventory decisions, product development, marketing campaigns, customer service, and strategic direction.

The warehouse unlocked some capacity, but it didn't fundamentally change my relationship to the store. I'd hoped that offloading fulfillment would create space for those bigger, bolder moves I'd been thinking about. And to some extent it did—we could handle higher volume without me being bottlenecked by physical constraints.

But the reality was that the store's success created its own demands regardless of where fulfillment happened. There was always more to do, always new opportunities to pursue, always communities to serve and products to create.

What The Warehouse Really Represented

Looking back, that oversized box truck was the perfect metaphor for how I felt about the 3PL transition.

The actual move was smaller than the vehicle we used to make it. The inventory we transported probably represented a few thousand dollars in wholesale value. The operational change, while significant, wasn't transformational.

But psychologically, emotionally, symbolically—it felt huge. It felt like proof that we'd built something real. It felt like crossing a threshold from amateur operation to professional business. It felt like earning the right to think bigger about what the store could become.

The warehouse gave me permission to take the store seriously as a legitimate part of our organizational operations rather than just a side project that happened to generate revenue. It gave the board confidence that merchandise wasn't distracting me from my real work because we'd professionalized that function. It gave me the infrastructure I felt I needed to make bolder decisions about product development, marketing, and growth.

Whether I actually needed all of that to make those moves—or whether I just needed to believe I had it—is a question I'm still not sure how to answer.

The Lesson About Milestones

The 3PL transition taught me something important about how we use external milestones to give ourselves permission to do things we probably could have done anyway.

I told myself I needed a warehouse before I could think bigger about the store's potential. But the truth is, most of the constraints I was operating under weren't really about fulfillment logistics. They were about confidence, legitimacy, and permission—from the board, from myself, from some imagined standard of what "real" businesses looked like.

The warehouse was real infrastructure that solved real problems. But it was also a symbol that mattered at least as much as the practical benefits it provided.

Sometimes we need those symbols. Sometimes we need external markers of progress that tell us—and tell others—that we've arrived at a new level. Sometimes we need permission from circumstances to do things we're already capable of doing.

That box truck, way too big for what we were moving, perfectly captured this dynamic. The practical move could have been accomplished with much less. But the psychological moment required something bigger, something that felt appropriate to the significance of what was happening.

And maybe that's okay. Maybe part of building things is recognizing when we need those milestone moments, even when they're slightly absurd, because they help us take ourselves seriously enough to do the work that comes next.

What Came After

Did the 3PL unlock those bigger, bolder moves I'd been imagining? Sort of.

We did expand our product line significantly in the year after the transition. We tested new designs more aggressively. We ran bigger marketing campaigns. We took risks we might not have taken when I was personally responsible for packing every resulting order.

But the store's trajectory was already set before we moved to the warehouse. The infrastructure change enabled growth, but it didn't create it. The growth came from community demand, smart product decisions, effective marketing, and the accumulation of small improvements over time.

The warehouse made it possible to handle that growth without me being physically bottlenecked by fulfillment operations. That mattered. But it wasn't the transformation I'd imagined it would be.

The real transformation was internal. It was about taking the store seriously as a professional operation worthy of professional infrastructure. It was about giving myself permission to think of the store as a legitimate business rather than just a scrappy side project.

And for that, the oversized box truck, the three-hour drive to Pennsylvania, and the warehouse that probably had more space than we'd ever use—all of it was exactly what I needed.

Sometimes the practical benefits matter less than the psychological permission that milestones provide. And sometimes that's enough reason to rent a truck that's way too big for what you're actually moving.