What to Expect When Demand Goes Berserk

Holiday Pressure Has a Way of Making Grown Operators Cry

Every year the same seasonal monsters crawl out of their caves: holiday shopping sprees, Prime Day stampedes, flash viral TikTok frenzies, and that weird category economists politely call catastrophic success. You might know it as the moment your Shopify dashboard looks like a slot machine someone kicked too hard. Orders are roaring in, retailer deadlines are snarling at you, and the question becomes less "How do we grow?" and more "How do we survive this without sleeping in the warehouse?"

Our research shows that e-commerce peaks are getting sharper. Retail analysts have noticed the holiday season compressing into narrower bursts of high-intensity volume. TikTok trends now move faster than the supply chains feeding them. Brands routinely see same-day order spikes in the thousands, a sudden demand storm with no weather forecast.

In other words: if you are feeling overwhelmed by the physics of modern e-commerce, you are not imagining things.

Why Peaks Keep Getting Steeper

Recent research shows that over 60 percent of shoppers now expect same-day or next-day shipping even during peak periods. Retailers have responded with brutal cutoff times. Miss a Target delivery window and they cancel the PO. Miss an Amazon routing requirement and your ranking drops or your listing stalls. Miss too many Walmart requirements and you collect chargebacks like souvenir spoons.

That is the climate brands walk into during the holidays. And if you are a growth-stage company, every one of those requirements feels like a trapdoor.

G10 sees this up close. Holly Woods, Director of Operations, describes the reality of retailer timelines with deadpan simplicity: "Target has a deadline for delivery and that is it, no exceptions. They will just cancel the order." Her team recently worked through the night when a client inbound was delayed at port. "We had to have the routing completed for pickup by the next morning. Weekend looming or not, it had to be picked up so it could hit Target by Monday."

The holidays do not respect weekends.

Scaling During Chaos

Research in logistics suggests that high-growth brands need two kinds of capacity: planned capacity and emergency capacity. Planned capacity is what you build models for. Emergency capacity is what you pray for when your product shows up on the Today Show or gets blasted to 10 million viewers on TikTok.

G10 builds for both.

The first layer is forecasting. Holly explains that peak planning starts months ahead: "We run forecast models, staffing models, and we audit inventory, equipment. We go above and beyond forecasting so if a customer says they are going to ship 5,000 orders, we do not just take 5,000. We add our own buffer on top of that."

The second layer is labor elasticity. Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience, puts it more bluntly: "We have the ability to flex up on labor. We feel very confident about scaling up quickly, having the right staffing on hand for those days, and even those weeks after Black Friday and Cyber Monday."

The third layer is geographic. A distributed network across Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and South Carolina means capacity can shift when one warehouse gets hammered. Holly calls it a "virtuous circle": faster inbounding, faster distribution, faster outbound.

When viral success arrives, the clock resets, not the commitment.

Meeting Retailer Cutoffs Without Losing Your Mind

For many brands, B2B shipping is the silent killer of peak season. The rules multiply. The penalties multiply faster. Our research shows that retailers increasingly fine brands for everything from barcode placement to pallet height to the timing of the ASN. One large sporting goods retailer now issues multi-hundred-dollar chargebacks for a single labeling error.

This is precisely where G10 has built muscle.

Joel notes that G10 maintains "over 99.9 percent ship accuracy" for B2B orders, a statistic he initially could not believe when he joined the company. "Walmart is pretty intense with their labeling rules. Dick's Sporting Goods is the same. If you do not do it right, you get massive chargebacks."

And Bryan Wright, CTO and COO, explains why G10 can sustain that accuracy during peak demand: the WMS was built for B2B from day one. It handles routing guides, label placement, SSCC barcodes, ASN timing, retailer specific rules, and full EDI flows. "Other 3PLs built D2C software and are trying to get into B2B. They may not realize the significant effort it takes to be compliant."

When the holidays hit, compliance mistakes cost real money. You need someone who knows what the retailers expect before the retailers expect it.

What Happens When Success Outruns Your Forecast

Nothing stresses a founder like shock demand. Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment, remembers a client whose product was featured on national TV. They started with one SKU. They became one of G10's largest clients in record time. "They doubled in size multiple times. That is what catastrophic success looks like."

Holly sees it too. "A customer might be shipping 100 or 200 orders a day. Then something goes viral on social media and suddenly the doors are being blown off. We have helped them get through that surge and grow their business as it comes in."

This is the part of scaling that rarely gets discussed: fulfillment becomes the bottleneck, not demand.

A fast growing brand recently asked Joel if G10 could turn around 10 Target POs in 48 hours with no warning. His answer: "Yes we can."

That answer only matters if you can back it up. And the team has backed it up, repeatedly.

How G10 Actually Pulls This Off

The short version is that G10 combines something unusual in the 3PL world: national footprint, enterprise grade tech, and boutique level attention.

The longer version comes straight from the people running the show.

Robotics: The Delavan warehouse is now running Zebra autonomous robots that triple lines picked per hour. Holly explains: "The robot knows the weights, the dimensions, the pick path. We have seen 3X efficiency gains."

Scan based accuracy: Connor stresses that everything is scanned. Nothing is on paper. "You can lose a lot of money having people ship stuff wrong or store it wrong. A 100 percent scan based WMS is crucial."

Rate shopping: G10 rate shops every shipment automatically through integrated APIs. Holly says it plainly: "We find the most cost effective shipping rate for the service defined for that package."

Same day shipping: Joel notes that for D2C orders placed before noon, "we are going to ship that order the same day."

Agility: Mark Becker, founder and CEO, has built G10 around what he calls enterprise scale with boutique care. That philosophy shows up in moments like this: "Over the most recent Prime Day we hit 100 percent shipped on time. We started getting behind in one of our warehouses at 8 p.m., so we sent someone on a flatbed directly to the FedEx hub."

When you do what it takes, you earn belief.

How We All Survive the Holidays

Research across logistics firms indicates that the brands that thrive during peak season share three habits: they share forecasts early, they monitor inventory daily, and they work with a 3PL that communicates like a human being.

That last habit is the one G10 emphasizes most.

Dedicated account managers. Direct phone numbers. No offshore ticket queue. No 24 hour limbo. Jen Myers says it best: "If you are outsourcing your logistics you are putting the heartbeat of your company in someone else's hands. You need someone you can call who cares about your business almost as much as you do."

Joel adds his own version: "One person you call. And things get done."

Peak season is a test. A test of preparation, yes. But also a test of improvisation, flexibility, and grit. The kind of grit that sends someone out at midnight with a truck so a client hits an Amazon metric that would have otherwise been missed.

The holidays are coming. They always come. But so do the people ready to meet them.

Ready To Get Through Peak Season Without Losing Sleep?

If you are staring down a holiday rush, a Prime Day push, or a TikTok tidal wave, now is the moment to get ahead of it. Talk with G10, share your forecasts, walk through your channels, and see how we can help you stretch capacity before the peak stretches you.