Assembly Line Outsourcing: Bringing Big-Brand Capabilities to Growing Companies

When your products need a line, but you do not have one

Growth often creates a strange kind of problem. Your products are complex enough to need assembly line style workflows, but you are not big enough to justify building a full facility. You still have to prep, label, kit, and rework inventory with the same precision as a large manufacturer. Assembly line outsourcing exists for this exact moment. It gives you access to serious operational capability without asking you to pour concrete and buy conveyors.

Many brands start looking at outsourcing only after a disappointing 3PL experience. As Maureen Milligan explains, "Most of the customers who come to us from another 3PL, their challenges have always been access to their data, order accuracy and efficiency, and basically just meeting the committed requirements." She adds, "Even when they were getting their new inventory delivered to the warehouses, they weren't getting received and on the shelves in a timely fashion to satisfy customer orders." If a provider cannot execute the basics, it will not survive running something that looks like an outsourced assembly line.

Why assembly-style work shows up long before you expect it

Founders often think assembly lines are only for huge enterprises. In reality, the need for repeatable, step by step workflows shows up much earlier. As soon as you are doing the same kitting, labeling, or packaging process hundreds or thousands of times, you have an assembly problem, whether or not you call it that.

Retail and marketplace demands accelerate this. Joel Malmquist points out, "Walmart's pretty intense with their labeling rules. Dick's Sporting Goods is the same; if you don't do it right, you get those massive chargeback." That is assembly line work in disguise. Each carton and pallet has to be prepared to spec, again and again.

Demand spikes add urgency. Holly Woods describes what happens when a brand takes off: "Sometimes these smaller customers come and work with G10, and um they might be shipping you know 100, 200 orders a day. Then something goes viral on social media, and all of a sudden the doors are being blown off on orders." That is when ad hoc prep breaks down and assembly line outsourcing becomes a survival strategy, not a luxury.

Why many 3PLs are not ready to run your line

Traditional 3PLs are designed for storage space and parcel throughput, not for building custom workflows that look and feel like an assembly line. They may be able to pick, pack, and ship, but they often struggle with highly repeatable, multi step work that has to hit tight quality standards.

Bryan Wright explains the system-level issue clearly: "A bad WMS system will not track inventory 100%, as it should." When you are trying to outsource something that functions like an assembly line, missing inventory detail becomes a showstopper. By contrast, he says, "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it."

That level of tracking is what makes outsourced assembly safe. Components move through staging, workstations, quality checks, and final pack. The system has to know where everything is at all times. Bryan also highlights why internal control of the platform matters: "With G10 we can make that change extremely quickly because we have our own development staff." Assembly line outsourcing only works if workflows and labels can be changed as fast as your business changes.

The founder's fear: losing control of a critical process

Outsourcing an assembly line feels risky. The work often sits close to the core of your brand. It defines how your product looks and feels when customers and retailers touch it. Founders worry that moving this outside the building means losing control over the details that matter most.

Joel shares how this concern gets voiced in practice: "Say Target drops 10 POs and gives us 48 hours to turn it around? Is G10 the right partner for us to navigate through that and execute at a high level?" That question is about more than shipping. It is about whether an outsourced operation can behave like a dedicated line when a big customer calls.

His answer focuses on structure and behavior under pressure: "We are able to help them get through that big surge and develop and grow their business as it comes in." Assembly line outsourcing has to mean more than having space. It has to mean having a team and a system that can rearrange priorities overnight.

Holly offers a vivid example of that kind of response: "Our supervisor, warehouse manager, and several employees worked that entire day into the night, came back in in the morning at 5 a.m. to make sure that we had the routing completed for that pickup for Target." That is what outsourced capacity looks like when it treats your project like its own.

How assembly line outsourcing supports omni channel brands

Many assembly-style projects are driven by channel expansion. A brand that started D2C now needs retail ready cases, Amazon compliant units, or special bundles for a wholesale partner. The core product remains the same, but the way it is prepared changes by channel.

Jen Myers talks about this shift: "Helping people grow, part of that is the channel expansion and having a warehouse management system, WMS, that supports that seamlessly." She adds, "Everything has to be connected. Now I'm selling into stores as well, and they order a whole pallet at a time as opposed to one unit at a time, as customers would do."

On the Amazon side, assembly line outsourcing often includes highly repeatable labeling and prep. Jen notes, "We also help them label products correctly." She warns what happens when that process is sloppy: "If you send stuff to Amazon that has the wrong labels on, or it's not to their specs, or the wrong dimensions, you get chargebacks basically they fine you!" An outsourced assembly line that understands those rules protects your margins.

Value added services wrapped around the line

Some of the most useful parts of assembly line outsourcing are the value added services that surround the core work. Kitting, bundling, relabeling, repacking, and even digital channel support often sit alongside the physical line itself.

John Pistone describes this expanded role: "We have created these other value-added services." He makes it concrete: "I can kit for them. I can bundle for them. I can build an Amazon seller central account, and I can do all the content build-up." That combination allows brands to change what they sell and how they sell it without reengineering their own operation every time.

On the negotiation and strategy side, Jen notes, "So a lot of it has been helping our customers navigate how to negotiate." Outsourcing an assembly line is not only about labor. It is also about tapping into people who have been through similar channel transitions many times before.

Visibility turning outsourced work into something you can trust

Outsourcing does not mean closing your eyes and hoping. It should mean gaining a clearer view of how your product moves. A good assembly line outsourcing setup lets you see the work as it happens rather than waiting for a summary report.

Bryan describes the visibility layer that makes this work: "We have portals that show you the data. We have history that shows you all of that tracking. It shows the product landed on the dock at 8 o'clock." That kind of transparency means you can follow components into the outsourced line and finished goods back out again.

Maureen explains how customers use that visibility in practice: "They can actually watch those progressions going on." For a founder or operations leader, being able to see a project advancing through outsourced assembly in real time makes it easier to say yes to future projects.

Culture as the real difference in outsourced operations

At the end of the day, an outsourced assembly line is still run by people. Systems and layouts matter, but the culture of the team doing the work determines whether the line runs the way you need it to, especially when things get hard.

Mark Becker describes the mentality at the top: "Yeah, I live in the grind every day." That grind is the same one founders feel when they push through tough stages of growth. It matters that the people running your outsourced work understand that feeling.

Bryan sets the standard this way: "You go 110% and make sure that when they're done, this project is something they're going to remember." That is a useful way to think about an outsourced line. Each project should feel memorable because of how smoothly it was executed, not because of the stress it created.

When problems do appear, Maureen explains the response: "We say, We made a mistake, this is what happened, this is how we're correcting, it and this is how we're going to make it right by you." That kind of accountability is what turns assembly line outsourcing from a risk into a long term asset.

Why assembly line outsourcing becomes a strategic lever

When it is done right, assembly line outsourcing lets brands act bigger than their footprint. You can run complex, repeatable workflows without taking on fixed costs and operational risk. You can say yes to more launches, more promotions, and more channel experiments because you are not trying to build a new process from scratch every time.

It all comes back to the basics that Connor Perkins lays out: "To be successful and grow rapidly you have to sell a lot of your products. That boils down to having a good product, but also having a good supply chain."

Assembly line outsourcing strengthens that supply chain right where product, packaging, and channel requirements meet. If your team is spending more time wrestling with how to build the work than deciding which work to pursue, it might be time to put a capable, outsourced line behind your brand.