Our Partnership With UPS
An inside look, plus tips on how to navigate the holiday season
As we all know, the Coronavirus Pandemic has impacted so many areas of global commerce and economics. We’ve all heard the stories around lumber inflation, chicken wing shortages and textile delays. The strain the Pandemic has created has impacted so many areas of business and life that we perhaps take for granted and exposed some new realities.
Global freight, supply chains and shipping have also been impacted. The stories and photos of the container ship parking lot off the coast of California, the customs delays - the impact has been real. As an East Coast based brand, we have been luckier than most as we import through eastern ports including New York, Charleston and Savannah where the delays haven’t been as bad as what we have seen out West. Our product team did an amazing job through the Pandemic to get our products as close as possible to “in full and on time” and thanks to their hard work, we were able to minimize delays within the Mountain Khakis supply chain.
A critical part, and something that most don’t think about, within a supply chain is the courier company used for shipping - both direct to consumer and to our wholesale retail partners. We made a change in 2020 to UPS and it was truly one of the best decisions we ever made. Let us tell you why in our latest installment of “The Khakis Chronicles”.
To start and quite simply, UPS supports small business better and supports the customers of our small business better than any courier we have worked with to date. This is undisputed and independently proven. Prior to the Pandemic, we used UPS’ main competitor for our courier/freight service and when business got extremely tough during 2020 & 2021, rather than help small business, our former courier company did absolutely the opposite. So, as any small business would do, we explored an alternative in UPS. We wish we had done it sooner!
UPS genuinely engaged with our team to understand our business and our business needs. Despite being a small business, we move a LOT of units and our annual spend on freight is significant - largely because we offer free shipping on orders over $99. They understood our business, they understood our technology needs, and they analyzed our business in ways that simply hadn’t been done before to truly help us. They sent Logistics Specialists, including Scott Maag, out to recommend how we could further streamline our operations, and they supplied new technology to increase our speed and operational efficiency.
They allocated exceptional Account Managers (initially Mrs. Raquel Battin), who connected and checked in with us regularly and ensured our onboarding was smooth and without service disruption. The transition was seamless. We were really impressed.
Recently, we caught up with our new Account Manager, Mr. Curtis Eidson, and his Director, Mr. Shane Chapman, to understand the strategy that UPS was taking this holiday season as we set our plan to ensure all our valued customers would have their Mountain Khakis in time for the holidays. The conversation once again had us in awe of the exceptional work UPS continues to do to help their partners.
It will come as no surprise that UPS’ holiday peak season is currently in full swing. Peak season means UPS’ daily shipments increase from about 21 million to 35 million shipments per day! It’s incredible. To ease the pressure of this demand, UPS expects to hire 100,000 seasonal employees to service their customers nationally, and in turn, to increase the speed at which we can service you. Credit to UPS for continuing to create employment across America.
Under their new CEO, Mrs. Carol B. Tomé, who joined UPS in June 2020 from Home Depot, UPS prioritized small business. Like Mountain Khakis, Mrs. Tomé is originally from Jackson, Wyoming and we were thrilled to learn she shares similar beliefs as us – to care about, support and work hard to grow small business in America. At a time when “big business” was putting incredible pressure on UPS to allocate more capacity, UPS resisted that pressure and deliberately allocated appropriate capacity to smaller businesses. This holiday season UPS is picking up from our warehouse seven days a week to ensure we can get our products to our customers ASAP. On most days we are same-day shipping from when the order is placed to when the order is shipped (provided that the order is in before about 2pm or so Eastern Time).
Also under Mrs. Tomé, UPS has invested $20 billion back into their network. This investment into American infrastructure is remarkable and includes building seven new “superhubs” across the country, 11 new aircraft this year (54 new aircraft since 2017) and 2 million square feet of additional capacity to better service their customers.
UPS also has the most user-friendly and convenient ‘My Choice’ App.
Download the App from the App store for iPhone. It’s an amazing tool that allows our customers to track your Mountain Khakis shipment, share the details with a friend or family member, change the delivery, get updates, as well as a host of other awesome features. We would love all our customers to download, use and organize your shipments with the UPS ‘My Choice’ App.
UPS is on time. Our hardworking and dedicated warehouse team shipped 11,243 shipments to Mountain Khakis customers between October 21st, 2021, and December 1st, 2021. 95.1% of these shipments were on time to our customer, meaning we were “right on” UPS’ on-time performance. This isn’t marketing hype, this is a fact according to Ship Matrix, an independent company tracking UPS’ performance and comparing it to their competitor. UPS continues to significantly outperform their competitor – and the following chart really speaks for itself. We care about customers, and UPS cares about our customers too!
So, what does all of this mean for our Mountain Khakis customers, and why are we so eager to share the incredible work being done by UPS?
Quite simply we, like UPS, are a customer-centric organization. We make great product, to create amazing life experiences. When our customers choose Mountain Khakis, we want to reward that choice with not only great products, but with fast and friendly service – meaning UPS is the perfect choice, the only choice, for us.
Finally, as we are well into the holiday season, it’s important, we share with you the dates you need to be placing orders. Don’t procrastinate - shop our new arrivals or sale event and get ahead of those last-minute rush shoppers!
