Kitting and Assembly Provider: How Smart Prep Work Accelerates Growth

When product prep becomes the bottleneck

Growth is exciting until your team spends more time prepping products than building your brand. Loose components, inserts, bonus items, and retailer specific packaging all require hands, time, and accuracy. A kitting and assembly provider steps in when operational prep work becomes too complex for an internal team to manage consistently.

Many brands arrive at this decision after bad experiences elsewhere. 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 expands on the consequences: "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."

Kitting becomes essential as your SKU count expands

At small scale, kitting feels manageable. But when daily order volume grows or your catalog shifts toward multipacks, bundles, seasonal kits, or influencer collaborations, complexity escalates fast. Your team faces new work instructions, new packaging rules, and new QC needs. Without the right support, that complexity becomes a drag on sales velocity.

Retailers add another layer. Joel Malmquist puts it directly: "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." Kitting is not just about grouping items. It is about preparing them to survive the real world of retail compliance.

Demand surges amplify the pressure. Holly Woods describes this perfectly: "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." A kitting and assembly provider must flex instantly when success arrives without warning.

Why many 3PLs struggle with kitting

Most 3PLs were never designed to handle kitting. Traditional warehouse systems track finished goods, not multi step workflows. Kitting requires specialized instructions, dynamic inventory movements, and tight QC. Without the right systems, mistakes multiply and orders fall behind.

Bryan Wright explains why outdated tools fail: "A bad WMS system will not track inventory 100%, as it should." The result is confusion. But modern systems behave differently. As Bryan notes, "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it."

That precision is essential when assembling custom bundles or preparing retail specific configurations. Bryan emphasizes adaptability: "With G10 we can make that change extremely quickly because we have our own development staff." Without that adaptability, a simple kitting change becomes a multi week delay.

The founder's underlying worry: losing control

Kitting mistakes are costly. One wrong label or missing insert can trigger a wave of customer complaints or retailer penalties. That is why many founders hesitate to hand the work to a provider. They fear losing oversight.

Joel hears this worry frequently. One customer asked him, "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?" The question is really about reliability under pressure.

Joel explains how structure supports execution: "We are able to help them get through that big surge and develop and grow their business as it comes in." A good kitting provider scales labor, shifts workflows, and keeps orders moving even when demand jumps.

Holly shares a clear example of this commitment: "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."

Visibility makes kitting trustworthy

Brands need to see what is happening inside the process. Kitting cannot rely on blind trust. Transparency eliminates guesswork and reinforces confidence.

Bryan describes this visibility: "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." Subassembly, assembly, and kitting all benefit from that same real time insight.

Maureen reinforces how customers use this transparency: "They can actually watch those progressions going on." Watching orders flow through kitting turns fear into certainty.

Kitting as a bridge to omni channel growth

As brands expand to new retailers, marketplaces, and international channels, their products must shift form. Each channel demands different packaging, labeling, or bundling. A skilled kitting and assembly provider turns those variations into standard workflows instead of operational emergencies.

Jon Pistone shares a powerful example of what operational agility enables: "We were able to turn that into a 15, 20 million dollar business in a year because we were able to compress the time of launch."

Culture is the hidden advantage in kitting work

Kitting is detail heavy and unforgiving. People must care about doing the small things right every time. Culture determines whether that happens.

Mark Becker expresses the mindset clearly: "Yeah, I live in the grind every day." That grit becomes the backbone of operational reliability.

Bryan explains the execution standard: "You go 110% and make sure that when they're done, this project is something they're going to remember." And when things do go wrong, Maureen notes, "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."

Why a kitting and assembly provider becomes a growth catalyst

Kitting work may look small, but it controls your ability to launch products, run promotions, and expand channels. When it breaks, everything slows. When it runs smoothly, growth accelerates.

Connor Perkins frames it simply: "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."

If your team is losing time to constant product prep, a kitting and assembly provider may be the structural shift that unlocks your next stage of scale.