Customer: Front Row, an Amazon-focused brand accelerator / multi-brand operator
Model: Runs FBA prep and middle-mile for a portfolio of brands, up to 1M+ units/month through ZonPrep plus export into FBA UK and FBA Canada
The shift: From a patchwork of prep providers and a manual tracking sheet to a single fulfillment hub with API-level visibility — cutting weeks out of the middle mile, halving placement-fee costs, and turning prep into a growth lever.
At a glance
- Inbound speed: PO placed to received at Amazon, from 3–5 weeks to 10–15 days.
- Middle mile: roughly 10–14 days shaved off the supply chain, company-wide.
- Days on hand: from 90 to the low 70s — roughly two weeks of inventory out of the system.
- Placement fees: zero on units flowing through ZonPrep; company-wide placement-fee costs cut in half.
- Prep cost: value-added services down ~27% on a per-unit basis across the book.
- Headcount: logistics team reduced by 1.5 full-time roles — while adding ~50 brands.
- Visibility: from a manual Google Sheet to a fully integrated API back-end for live PO tracking across the middle mile.
- Transparency: from a manual CSV request-and-wait to ZonPrep pulling codes on Front Row’s behalf, per production run.
- Assortment: kitting and bundling at scale — line expansion without new product development.
Front Row runs FBA prep and middle-mile logistics for a portfolio of brands, at enterprise volume, across domestic Amazon and export lanes into the UK and Canada. When you operate at that scale, your prep partner is key infrastructure that enables growth across the entire network.
ZonPrep is Front Row’s 3PL of choice. The two have been working together under a long-term partnership and ZonPrep now handles roughly 80% of Front Row’s domestic volume into Amazon, plus direct export into FBA UK and FBA Canada.
“We really consider ZonPrep a fulfillment hub. Everything flows through there, and from there it goes everywhere else — domestically into Amazon, or we export into Canada or the UK. Basically all things flow through ZonPrep right now.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
Working with ZonPrep means the Front Row group only needs to monitor one PO, one order, and one dock instead of asking each brand’s warehouse to manage the chaos of shipping into Amazon.
That hub means Front Row never has to worry about patchwork infrastructure. They get simplicity, speed, and savings.
We were able to chat with Dan Schulman, Vice President of Logistics and Alexandra Carmody, SVP Commercial Operations to discuss their experience with ZonPrep and what we unlocked for their business and the brands that trust them.
Why Front Row went looking
Front Row’s prep story started the way most do: in-house. Five to seven years ago, the team was prepping packages in its own office. As volume grew, the work moved out to a handful of small, legacy 3PLs — no contracts, limited system integration, a patchwork of working relationships that had accumulated rather than been chosen.
Dan Schulman joined as Vice President of Logistics from food distribution — an industry of clean, tightly run warehouses held to hard standards. On one of his first days, he walked the floor of Front Row’s legacy provider.
“Conditions were not up to standard, and poor inventory management meant end-of-month close would take almost into the next month to close.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row.
Front Row gave that provider specific feedback on what needed to change. Arguably, none of it happened. So Dan ran a competitive RFP — a full bid doc covering annual volumes, tech integration, insurance, warehouse cleanliness, throughput and capacity planning, network footprint, lead times, and how much of the administrative workload each provider could take on entirely.
ZonPrep shot to the top of the list: Amazon specialization, pricing, the working relationship with Amazon on inbound appointments, and — the sleeper criterion — the amount of back-office work ZonPrep internalizes that Front Row’s team would otherwise own. That last one turned out to matter more than anyone scored it for.
One hub instead of a patchwork
Before ZonPrep, Front Row’s inbound was spread across several prep providers, with brands often shipping direct to FBA out of their own buildings. That meant asking a small warehouse to manage five to ten PO distributions at once, label everything to Amazon’s spec, and not get any of it wrong. It rarely went smoothly.
“It’s a very challenging operation for [brand warehouses]. We leverage ZonPrep’s quick turn times and pricing so our brands ship to one destination — ZonPrep cross-docks and distributes. It lessens the complexity on their end.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
Consolidating that patchwork into a single hub did two things at once. It drove per-unit prep cost down substantially by using one operation instead of many, and was able to gain the leverage that comes with scale. This route also took the distribution burden off Front Row’s brands entirely: ship to one place, let ZonPrep handle the splits, the labeling, and the freight out.
Their ZonPrep hub is also their export hub. Front Row’s FBA UK and FBA Canada shipments leave from the same building as its domestic volume, which means they can route even international logistics through their one node versus a separate international workflow they have to oversee.
Centralizing cross-dock
Previously, anything that went through Front Row that needed item-level prep (for example, FNSKU labeling and value-added services) typically took about four to five days wall-to-wall.
With ZonPrep, a straight cross-dock comes in one door, gets shipments created and a label on the outside, and is back out the door in about two days. That’s time-savings of two to three days even before considering the freight advantages.
Carmody puts the brand-side effect plainly: a high-growth brand often has one person acting as liaison to an internal warehouse — and that person used to manage upwards of 18 different shipping destinations.
“We would go from having 18 different shipping locations to saying: bring it into our 3PL partner. They’ll do all of your kits there, Transparency labeling there, anything else additional — and get it out to FBA in the same amount of time, if not quicker, than their warehouse could.” — Alexandra Carmody, SVP Commercial Operations, Front Row
From weeks to days, and the cash it frees
At Front Row’s volume, every day a unit spends in the pipeline is cash tied up. Before, it took weeks for dock-to-dock prep. On average, it took three to five weeks from a PO being placed to inventory actually received at Amazon.
“We used to average 90 days on hand across the business. Now we’re down to the low 70s. We were anywhere between three to five weeks from PO placed to received at Amazon — now we’re in the 10-to-15-day range.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
With ZonPrep, turnaround time dropped to under several days from receipt to ready-to-go, and the way ZonPrep preps and loads its trucks means product gets received at Amazon faster than it ever did. PO-to-received now runs in the 10-to-15-day range for straightforward brands. Priority POs get pulled forward and expedited when Front Row needs them.
Add it up across the company and Front Row has shaved roughly 10 to 14 days off its middle-mile supply chain. Faster lead times mean less buffer inventory, which means days on hand fell from 90 to the low 70s, and Front Row was able to pull roughly two weeks of required inventory out of the system. That’s a large cash position freed up across the whole business.
“That’s a pretty large unlock in terms of free cash. It’s allowed us to make sizable investments back into Front Row’s operating model.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
That freed cash didn’t sit idle.
This speed comes from the visibility ZonPrep built into the relationship. You can’t safely pull weeks of buffer out of your supply chain unless you can see exactly where every PO is.
Placement fees: zero through ZonPrep
“Because of the way they organize shipments, we’ve removed essentially a large percentage of our placement fees.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
Front Row was paying Amazon’s inbound placement fees straight out of their own revenue. They were covering all placement fees for the brands that worked with them, but on units flowing through ZonPrep, they were able to reduce placement fees to zero.
“We were paying $0.23 on placement fees on a per-unit basis. Now we’re down to $0.12. So we’ve cut our placement fees by 50% on a per-unit basis, while increasing the number of units shipped by several million a month…The units that flow through ZonPrep, we’ve taken them down to zero.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
Instead of dumping inventory into Amazon’s National Cross Dock network and eating placement fees on it, ZonPrep customers can send consolidated, floor-loaded freight from ZonPrep’s facility directly to regional fulfillment centers — bypassing the expensive default path.
Company-wide, including the brands that ship direct to FBA and never touch ZonPrep, Front Row’s placement-fee costs have been cut in half on a per-unit basis, even as monthly units shipped grew by several million.
Scale without headcount
“What’s nice about ZonPrep is they’ve internalized a lot of the administrative functions that my team historically owned, such as shipment creation. So it allowed me to basically scale my team without adding additional headcount.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
Since engaging ZonPrep, Front Row’s logistics team has been able to adapt with the growing demands of roughly 50 new partners, a task Dan estimates would otherwise take multiple full-time hires.
ZonPrep was able to internalize the administrative work that would otherwise be on Front Row’s team: shipment creation, labeling workflows, the button-clicking layer of FBA logistics.
“The admin tasks are really the button-clicking part of the job. It’s allowed my team to act more strategically versus living in Seller Central creating shipments ad nauseam.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
The time that Front Row saved instead went to looking holistically at brands, finding middle-mile reductions, working out what can ship direct to FBA, and building business cases for packaging changes.
Packaging engineered for FBA economics
Most brand packaging is designed for a shelf and storefront presentation, not e-commerce distribution. ZonPrep’s in-house hardware (shrink machines, bubble-wrap machines) lets Front Row fix that at the warehouse instead of asking every brand to retool its boxes.
The results show up in three places:
Lower prep costs. Across Front Row’s entire book of business, value-added services cost is down roughly 27% on a per-unit basis versus before ZonPrep.
Lower FBA fees. For some of Front Row’s powdered supplement brands, shrink-wrapping reduced the physical geometry of the item, which dropped the FBA fee tier, and boosted that brand’s profitability. The idea came from a facility tour: Front Row saw it working in ZonPrep’s building and rolled it out to other brands.
Faster throughput. ZonPrep’s process economics let Front Row push brands toward larger case-pack sizes — break down one big box instead of a hundred little ones — and route more freight as straight cross-dock instead of item-level prep. Product gets to market faster.
And on top of that all, Front Row and their brands get better item protection. ZonPrep seals and protects at volume, and shrink-wraps premium items so the packaging arrives at the customer’s door intact. Lower damage rates, better reviews, better customer experience for their brands.
Three major ZonPrep differentiators
Visibility: from a manual sheet to a live system
This is the first of the three capabilities the Front Row team flagged as genuinely rare among 3PLs, and is the foundation everything else stands on.
Front Row used to track inventory the way most operators do: a hodgepodge of systems and a manual Google Sheet. There was no real visibility into where a PO actually was once it left the gate.
ZonPrep replaced that with a fully integrated API back-end that was built, not bought. ZonPrep put real dev hours and real dollars into integrating with Front Row’s systems, based on Front Row’s tech team’s requests. It’s a two-way investment, and Dan calls it out as the proof the partnership is real.
“They’ve put a lot of dev hours into making it work. They’ve spent the money to make our systems work with their systems.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
Front Row achieved full PO visibility across the entire middle mile: pickup, tender, delivery, and every process bucket inside ZonPrep’s building. If a PO gets hung up, they can see it, find it, and do a deep dive on what happened. The visibility unlocked tracking they never had into cost, lead times, and inventory awareness.
The point isn’t just that Front Row can see its inventory. It’s that they can act on it:
“At any time we can challenge ZonPrep on it, and they can prioritize product above others. It lets us be very strategic about how we deploy inventory. It’s visibility we never had.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
Transparency at scale: codes pulled for you
The second rare capability. Amazon’s Transparency program is a labeling burden, and for a multi-brand operator it’s a recurring one. The old process was manual: request the code, send a CSV, wait.
ZonPrep built internal tooling to pull Transparency codes on Front Row’s behalf — all it needs is account access. The manual handoff is gone, and so are the days it used to add.
“We had a manual process. We both used tech to solve it, and now it’s solved.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
This is the capability new prospects ask about most. The number-one question Front Row hears from brands evaluating it is whether it has a real, operational answer for Transparency stickering and labeling efficiency. This is a concrete data point they can hold up against what their own warehouse is doing.
The revenue side is bigger than the ops side. Faster Transparency turnaround gives Front Row a stronger pitch to enroll brands in the program at all — and enrollment protects the listing:
“To increase the buy box from 60% on a given SKU across one of our tier-one brands to a full 90% — that’s anywhere from $10,000 in savings upwards of $150K, depending on the brand.” — Alexandra Carmody, SVP Commercial Operations, Front Row
Physical capabilities: kitting, bundling, and protection
The third capability is about hardware and throughput — and it changed what Front Row can sell, not just how it ships.
Line expansion without new product development. For a brand operator, the fastest way to grow an assortment isn’t always a new product, but a new bundle, multipack, or exclusive kit.
The constraint used to be operational: brands either had to do the bundling themselves, or Front Row could recommend bundle ideas and services but couldn’t actually monitor or capture value from them. And a small warehouse gets charged an arm and a leg to do kitting at all.
ZonPrep’s throughput and in-house hardware took the constraint off. Now Front Row can run kitting and bundling at scale (Dan mentions “10 brands and 10 different bundle types” at once), without choosing one over another.
“Focusing on the capability of line expansion without NPD — how do you expand your assortment without new product development, and how can a warehouse be the solution to that? The idea of exclusive kits, differentiating your assortment on Amazon using a partner like ZonPrep — that’s the win.” — Alexandra Carmody, SVP Commercial Operations, Front Row
Amazon-exclusive bundles that protect the buy box. Kits built at ZonPrep exist only on Amazon — so when a brand’s in-store or DTC channel runs a 20%-off promotion, there’s no price-parity conflict, no suppression, no lost buy box. The listing is insulated by design.
Test, then scale — fast. Is a two-pack the right offer, or a three-pack? Front Row can A/B test in-market, and once the data lands, ZonPrep’s capacity means a fast follow with a large production run on the winner.
From hero SKU to page-one coverage. Many of Front Row’s brands are hero-SKU DTC brands without a packed new-product calendar. Bundles and kits built from existing products let a brand take over more of page-one search results for its own branded terms — and those differentiated SKUs then redeploy to the brand’s DTC site, Walmart, or TikTok Shop.
“You don’t have a robust new product development calendar? That’s fine. We can come up with three new kits or bundles that make sense within the channel, based off data we see — and the brand can take over more of page-one search results for branded terms and really own the channel.” — Alexandra Carmody, SVP Commercial Operations, Front Row
Protection that shows up at the customer’s door. The same throughput-plus-hardware advantage cuts damage. Front Row used to deal with issues like shampoos with no seal cap because the previous provider couldn’t keep up. ZonPrep seals and protects at volume, and is well-versed in how to ensure goods arrive in pristine shape.
Building a relationship with continuous improvement
Front Row and ZonPrep worked together to find our best working relationship to date. The inventory log went from a Google Sheet to a real integration. The Transparency codes went from a manual CSV to automated. Each was a problem both teams looked at, decided to solve with tech, and then actually solved.
“ZonPrep works as an extension of Front Row. They’ve become part of the Front Row family.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
Both teams built real ways of working around brand onboarding: getting ZonPrep the right information from the get-go so every new brand is set up for success.
“It makes us feel like we have our own warehouse. Where other accelerators have built that capability, we have partnered with the best — and it’s become a pseudo extension of us.” — Dan Schulman, VP of Logistics, Front Row
The bottom line of working with a true logistics partner
Front Row didn’t need Amazon logistics explained to them. They needed the patchwork gone. ZonPrep gave them a single hub that took inbound from weeks to days, dropped days on hand from 90 to the low 70s, took placement fees on ZonPrep-routed units to zero, cut prep costs 27% per unit, replaced a manual tracking sheet with live API visibility, automated Transparency, and turned prep into a growth lever through kitting and bundling at scale — all while Front Row’s logistics team got smaller and its brand portfolio got bigger.
The right prep partner lets a brand operator activate a billion-dollar supply chain — turnkey. Front Row is what that looks like in practice. Dan puts it best:
“We’ve engaged multiple 3PL providers that do this work. Doing this work and doing this work right are far different things.” — Dan Schulman, Vice President of Logistics, Front Row
Want to see what ZonPrep could take off your plate? Request your FBA opportunity analysis at zonprep.com.