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It wasn’t enough for Ricky Choi, the co-founder of the clothing company Nice Laundry, to make high-quality socks, underwear and lounge attire. He wanted to deliver those goods in sturdy, chic packages, something his customers would appreciate and remember.
In its first years, Nice Laundry, a direct-to-consumer brand, hired a third-party warehouse and shipped its socks in a simple drawstring bag. Then Mr. Choi and his partners hit on the idea of sending customers an array of socks in an attractive container. A shopper could choose, say, 18 different socks from the company website and “build a box.”
A fine idea, in theory. But to meet the standards Mr. Choi and his team had in mind, a warehouse worker would have had to select from 300 sock styles before packing up the assortments ordered by Nice Laundry’s customers. The facility turned down the business, noting it would have had to reconfigure its entire operation to pull off such a task.
So Mr. Choi decided to build a new kind of warehouse.
He rented a 1,500-square-foot storage unit in Paterson, N.J., and removed the walls. He and his employees reported there each morning, rather than to an office.
Next, the brand brought in customer service workers. When shoppers contacted Nice Laundry with a question about shipping or an order change, they received an immediate response from someone on the floor.
“We just kept asking, ‘What more can we do?’” Mr. Choi, 39, said.
Soon, Nice Laundry moved to a larger warehouse and installed a photography studio. It added embroidery machines and taught its workers how to monogram.
“If you lived in a 200-mile radius and placed an order at 11 a.m. for a set of monogrammed socks, you would receive it the next day,” Mr. Choi said. “Massive competitive advantage.”
It wasn’t long before other brands took notice and asked Nice Laundry to handle their fulfillment needs. Thus was born Outerspace, a spinoff business dedicated to the kind of warehousing Mr. Choi had in mind.
Headquartered next to Teterboro Airport in an industrial area of New Jersey, and with five warehouses across North America, Outerspace aims to set itself apart from its competitors as the “high touch” fulfillment center for chic brands.
Its clients include Aimé Leon Dore, Hill House Home and STATE Bags, all of which can offer custom options like made-to-order monogramming and engraving.
“As soon as e-commerce arrived, the actual delivery experience became a fundamental part of the customer experience,” said Mr. Choi, who is also chief executive of Outerspace. “Is it coming quickly? Does it look nice when it arrives? It put a lot of stress on this one part of the supply chain that had been trucks and pallets for such a long time.”
For brands that don’t have their own brick-and-mortar stores, logistics is destiny — the difference between maintaining or losing customers. Plenty of popular TikTok videos critique how small businesses package their orders.
Now, five years after its founding, Outerspace is venturing beyond logistics by creating its own magazine, Outerspace Journal, with the help of a former Condé Nast editor.
“Rather than a pamphlet you send in the mail, I turned it on its head and said, ‘Let’s make it a magazine,’” said Zachary Weiss, Outerspace’s head of brand. “I wanted this product to confuse people: Are they a warehouse provider or is this a consumer brand?”
The debut issue features a cover image by the noted photographer Henry Leutwyler. An article headlined “Five Things You Probably Don’t Know About Shipping Out Orders — But Should” presents a lively account of the business.
“We all use distribution warehouses,” said Yolanda Edwards, who is a former creative director of Condé Nast Traveler and advised the publication. “We just don’t know what they’re like. I like the idea of taking something deeply unsexy and making it cool.”
Outerspace may be the only warehouse firm that has its own fragrance, Lunar Rain, which it sends to select clients. And in collaboration with the French workwear brand Le Mont Saint Michel, it made a limited edition of chore coats that it has given to select employees and clients but does not sell to the public.
Abbott Stark, the co-founder of Ogee, an organic skin care line that uses Outerspace, praised its handling of the company’s products.
“We use this sustainable, recycled crinkle wrap,” Mr. Stark said. “When we’re doing our gift set assemblies, the gift tissue is folded a certain way, with a sticker. At every level of the package, we want to show this precision and care.”
For Hill House Home, Outerspace set itself apart from other warehouses by handling surges when new products were released in drops.
“We’ll have tens of thousands of orders a day,” said Nell Diamond, Hill House’s chief executive. “We were looking for a partner who could not only support the orders, but get them out in a timely manner — and beautifully wrapped.”
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Choi and Mr. Weiss led a tour of the company’s 140,000-square-foot facility in New Jersey. It looked much like any warehouse, except for the embroidery and engraving equipment along one wall. Pearl-snap shirts monogrammed with various college logos, sold by a brand called Criquet, had recently been run through the line.
Employees used the laser cutters to engrave personal messages onto metal tokens for Wander Club, a company that sells the trinkets to people who want to commemorate their travels.
Gesturing toward the floor-to-ceiling shelves, Mr. Choi estimated there were 150,000 products in the building. Each brand, he added, had a dedicated space, as well as workers who focus on that label.
“We want this to feel like your own warehouse,” he said. “Except you don’t have to take on a bunch of debt, you don’t have to sign a lease, you don’t have to manage an industrial work force.”
With 400 employees, Outerspace is now bigger than Nice Laundry.
“By a lot,” Mr. Choi said.
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