If your business is growing quickly, your warehouse setup can turn from “sorted” to “outgrown” faster than you would expect. That’s exactly the position one of our e-commerce 3PL clients has been in over the past six months, and it’s a pattern we see often with fast-scaling operators.
The growth timeline
- January: First warehouse fitted with pallet racking from scratch.
- April (3 months later): The client had already outgrown warehouse one and moved into a larger facility. We installed racking to suit, lifting pallet capacity by 84%.
- July (3 months after that): A third warehouse came online, increasing pallet capacity by a further 109%.
Across six months, that’s a 550% increase in total pallet storage capacity, a scale of growth most businesses would spread across several years.
What this looked like for the client
For a business growing this fast, the racking system isn’t a one-off purchase, it’s infrastructure that needs to keep pace as volumes, staff and warehouse footprint all change at once. Each new site meant a new design conversation: how much bulk storage versus pick-face access, how quickly it could be installed and whether the racking brand could be resupplied fast enough to avoid delays as the next expansion came into view.
If that trajectory sounds familiar, it’s worth choosing a racking partner that can grow at the same pace you do.
Designing for speed and flexibility
Working alongside the client’s material handling equipment (MHE) supplier, we designed a layout that separates fast hand-picking access at lower levels from bulk pallet storage above. This keeps high-frequency picking efficient while making full use of vertical warehouse space for reserve stock, a configuration well suited to the pick-pack-dispatch rhythm of e-commerce fulfilment.
SSI Schaefer
For a business scaling this quickly, downtime waiting on stock isn’t an option. The client wanted a racking brand with proven reliability and consistent availability, so we specified SSI Schaefer racking across all three installations, ensuring the systems could be sourced, expanded and matched quickly as each new warehouse came online.
What we took from this project
Three warehouses in six months meant three separate design and install cycles, each one shaped by what we’d learned on the last site. That kind of responsiveness is what growing businesses need from a racking partner: someone who can turn around a design quickly, understands that today’s layout might not fit in three months and builds with the next stage of growth already in mind.
We are proud to have supported this client’s growth so far and we’re already back on site scoping the next stage. If your business is on a similar trajectory, it is a good time to start that conversation before the warehouse runs out of room.
