Rapid Response Assembly: Turning Spikes Into Shipments

When demand moves faster than the warehouse

Most brands dream about demand spikes. A viral post, a celebrity mention, a big promotion that finally lands. Then the orders show up and the dream starts to feel different. The phones light up, dashboards flash, and suddenly the warehouse looks small and slow. Rapid response assembly exists for that moment. It is the difference between riding the wave and getting knocked flat by it.

By the time leaders start asking about rapid response, they usually have scars. 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." When that is your starting point, a spike in demand does not feel like an opportunity. It feels like a threat.

Why rapid response is an assembly problem, not just a picking problem

When orders surge, people tend to stare at pick and pack capacity. How many orders per hour can the team handle. How many stations can you open. Under the surface, assembly is often the real bottleneck. Kits, bundles, special packs, and retail builds all depend on upstream work. If assembly cannot keep up, picking teams spend their time waiting for products that do not exist yet.

Holly Woods has seen that dynamic play out many times: "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." In that moment, every missed pre-assembly job, every half finished kit, and every vague bundle definition turns into a scramble.

Retail and marketplace programs add more load. Routing guides, label rules, and pallet specs do not relax just because your orders went through the roof. 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." Rapid response assembly has to hit the gas without ignoring those rules.

What rapid response assembly looks like in practice

Rapid response assembly is not just working faster. It is having the structure to shift people, space, and attention toward the right work quickly. That means standard recipes for common kits, bundles, and retail packs, stored in a system, not in one supervisor's head. It means knowing which assembly projects can be paused, which must be finished, and which new builds are needed to support a spike.

On the services side, it leans on the same capabilities that support daily work. John Pistone explains, "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." In a rapid response situation, those services are not new. They are the same muscles you use every day, pushed harder for a short burst.

Jen Myers ties this back to the system that holds everything together: "Helping people grow, part of that is the channel expansion and having a warehouse management system, WMS, that supports that seamlessly." She continues, "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." Rapid response assembly depends on that connection. You cannot spin up work for one channel by quietly breaking promises to another.

Systems that make fast moves possible

Speed without structure is just chaos. Rapid response assembly only works when the warehouse management system can see inventory, trigger work, and track progress in real time. If your WMS cannot handle that, adding more people will not save you.

Bryan Wright does not mince words: "A bad WMS system will not track inventory 100%, as it should." In a surge, that means you will find out about shortages halfway through a build or discover that the products you thought existed were actually sitting in limbo on a cart.

He describes the other side of that line like this: "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." That level of tracking supports WMS driven assembly tasks and scan based assembly accuracy. The system can tell teams what to pick, where to build, and how many units are still needed to support the orders already queued up.

Adaptability is just as important as visibility. Bryan points out, "With G10 we can make that change extremely quickly because we have our own development staff." When a promotion changes, a retailer updates a pack rule, or a marketing team decides to push a new bundle, you cannot wait for a software vendor to react. Rapid response assembly demands that your WMS and workflows can be tuned in real time.

The founder's fear: big moments going sideways

Founders and operations leaders know that not all demand is created equal. Some spikes really matter. A national retail launch. A viral social moment. A major marketplace deal. Those are the weeks when you earn or lose trust with customers and buyers you have been chasing for years.

Joel hears that fear in very direct questions. 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?" That is a rapid response assembly question as much as a transportation question. Can you build, kit, label, and pack on that timetable without cutting corners that will show up as chargebacks or returns.

He explains how his team handles those moments: "We are able to help them get through that big surge and develop and grow their business as it comes in." For brands, that is the difference between treating big wins as near disasters and treating them as proof that they are ready for the next size of opportunity.

Holly offers a ground level view of what that looks like: "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." Rapid response assembly is built on that kind of willingness to show up when the calendar does not care about normal hours.

Building playbooks before the spike, not during it

Rapid response sounds heroic, but the real work happens long before anything goes viral. It means building assembly playbooks for likely scenarios so the operation does not have to invent a new process in the middle of a rush. Those playbooks define which SKUs can be pre built, how bundles will be assembled, how retail packs will be configured, and how labor will shift when demand jumps.

Bryan describes the visibility that helps shape those plans: "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 same history can show how long past projects took, where bottlenecks appeared, and how many units per hour different teams can realistically build.

Maureen explains how customers use that kind of insight: "They can actually watch those progressions going on." When you can see how a previous promotion or retail build behaved, you can plan better for the next one. Rapid response becomes less about guessing and more about adjusting known patterns to a new demand level.

Rapid response in an omni channel world

Most brands do not get clean, single channel spikes. A social media wave hits D2C. A retailer schedules a promotion. Amazon sales jump after a review or a feature. Often, those things overlap. Rapid response assembly has to work across channels, not just for one.

Jen highlights this omni channel reality: "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." In practice, that means using one set of assembly capabilities for Shopify bundles, Amazon ready units, and retail compliant packs, then shifting capacity where it is needed most without losing track of inventory for the others.

On the services side, John says, "We have created these other value-added services." He notes, "I can kit for them. I can bundle for them." Rapid response assembly uses those same services flexibly. On a normal week, they support steady growth. On a spike week, they focus on the work that protects the most important windows.

Visibility when the clock is ticking

Spikes are stressful when you cannot see what is happening. Leaders end up asking the same questions over and over. How far along are we. How many kits are done. Will we make the truck. Rapid response assembly depends on visibility that is good enough to answer those questions without guesswork.

Bryan describes the data layer that supports that calm: "We have portals that show you the data. We have history that shows you all of that tracking." In the middle of a surge, that history becomes a live feed. You can see receipts, open assembly jobs, completed quantities, and outbound loads tied back to specific promotions or POs.

Maureen notes the reaction when customers finally get that view: "They can actually watch those progressions going on." For teams staring at tight deadlines, watching those progress bars move is very different from hoping that a project is somewhere near done.

Culture that shows up when it hurts

Rapid response assembly is not just about software and plans. It is about people willing to lean in when things get hard. Systems can point to the work. Only people can actually do it. That is why culture matters so much.

Mark Becker captures the mindset that underpins that culture: "Yeah, I live in the grind every day." That grind lives on the floor during long shifts when teams are building, labeling, and wrapping product so your brand can keep up with demand.

Bryan sets the standard for how important projects should feel: "You go 110% and make sure that when they're done, this project is something they're going to remember." Rapid response assembly is full of those projects. A first national retailer launch. A breakout holiday season. A massive marketplace feature that doubles volume overnight.

When something breaks during those pushes, Maureen describes 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." Rapid response is not perfection. It is the ability to recover fast enough that customers and buyers still feel taken care of.

Why rapid response assembly becomes part of strategy

From a distance, rapid response assembly sounds like a fire drill skill. Something you only need once in a while. Up close, it is a strategy. It determines which opportunities you can safely say yes to. It shapes how confident you feel about launching new products, chasing new buyers, or leaning into big promotional moments.

It connects directly to Connor Perkins's simple framing: "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." Rapid response assembly strengthens that supply chain at the exact point where growth stops being a slide and starts being a very real pile of work.

If your internal conversations after every spike include too many sentences that start with We survived, but and not enough that start with We handled that and we are ready for the next one, it may be time to treat rapid response assembly as a capability you build on purpose. With the right WMS, workflows, visibility, and culture in place, the next surge of demand will not just test your operation. It will showcase it.