3PL Case Study • Living Style

When a Small Program Becomes a Big Problem

How Stewardship helped Living Style take a growing swatch card program off their plate and give their team their time back. 

“Rusty and his team are much more than a 3PL warehouse. It doesn’t matter what the issue is, they’re always quick to try to come up with a solution. If something comes up that’s outside the original scope, it’s never ‘that’s not our problem.’ It’s always, ‘What do we need to do to make this work right for everybody?’ That’s just the kind of partner they are.”

— Jennie Spigner, Living Style

The Challenge

Some operational problems don’t announce themselves. They just grow in the background until one day you look up and realize your supervisor is printing shipping labels when she should be doing something else entirely.

That’s exactly what happened to Jennie Spigner and her team at Living Style.

Living Style sells upholstered furniture — sofas, sectionals, recliners — to major big box retailers. To help customers see and feel fabric options before purchasing, they launched a swatch card program for major retail customers. It started small. A back room. A laptop. UPS WorldShip. A few addresses typed in by hand.

Then it grew faster than anyone anticipated. The volume reached a point where it was no longer sustainable. At one point, one of Jennie’s supervisors was spending a significant amount of time printing shipping labels, and it became clear they’d need to hire someone just to keep up. Bringing on more headcount wasn’t the answer. They needed a better solution.

The Solution

Our team at Stewardship was already managing Living Style’ replacement-parts warehousing when we realized how time-consuming the swatch program had become. We offered to take over the program to help their team buy back valuable time. 

We came on-site to physically pick up the swatch inventory and move it to our facility. One of our team members sat down with Jennie’s staff to walk through the programs and processes so nothing got lost in the handoff. Within 30 days, the program was fully transitioned and running out of our warehouse.

Today, we ship more swatch cards per week than replacement parts. What started as an overflow solution has become a core part of what we do for Living Style.

The Results

✓ Full program transition completed in under 30 days

✓ Significant hours reclaimed weekly — label printing and order management removed from the internal team’s plate

✓ Supervisor and staff time redirected to higher-value work

✓ Program now running at a higher volume than the original parts fulfillment operation

Your team’s time is too valuable to spend on logistics. If your team is spending too much time on fulfillment, let’s talk about how we can help.

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