A brand has one peak. A 3PL has one per client, and they all arrive at once — usually as a forecast in October, after the client has booked the ad spend that will produce the orders. By then the question isn't what packaging you'd like. It's what can still be on your floor in time.
Here's that answer from a plant on the border, sorted by what's still possible.
Three kinds of packaging, three different clocks
If a client's branded mailer isn't specced yet, the honest answer is to run peak on stock and print in January. The customer notices a late order. Nobody notices a white mailer.
- Stock mailers and poly bags — standard sizes, black or white, no print. The fastest thing we make. The constraint is the converting queue, not the film.
- Suffocation warning bags for clients who prep for Amazon. Printed, but with stock artwork, so they run like stock: the warning in English, Spanish and French on film of at least 1.5 mil, with vent holes on the larger sizes.
- Custom-printed mailers in a client's brand. Plates, a press slot, and a minimum of 50,000 pieces per artwork. In October the constraint is the press slot, not the print: a spec locked this week gets the next open slot, and nothing about waiting improves that position.
What Tijuana changes
There's no ocean leg. Our plant runs extrusion, printing and converting under one roof — 100 tonnes of film a month upstream, 7.8 million bags a month through converting — and finished goods cross at Otay Mesa, about a day from West Coast distribution centers. The four-to-six-week transit that makes an October order from Asia a gamble doesn't exist here.
What does exist is the queue. Capacity slots fill in the order specs are locked, so the calendar for a 3PL is: lock the sizes and volumes now, film and converting run in October, product on your racks before the promos fire. Branded runs on our 10–15 day standard lead time from PO go in the same queue.
If you'd rather not buy it at all
For a warehouse absorbing five clients' forecasts, the bigger risk isn't lead time. It's buying to a forecast that turns out to be wrong. Our consignment program puts the stock on your floor without the bet: title stays with us until a bag is used, you're billed monthly on actual consumption, and slow-mover risk is ours, not yours.
On countersign, a 150,000-bag starter pallet across our top six SKUs leaves Tijuana within ten business days, and a 14-day free window starts the day it arrives. If the operation is stable enough that you'd rather own the stock for a lower per-bag price, the vendor-managed version runs the same replenishment with title at delivery.
One thing a 3PL can do that a brand can't
Consolidate. Five clients on five slightly different mailer sizes is five thin SKUs; five clients on three standard sizes is three deep ones, which are easier to stock, easier to reorder and cheaper per bag. Most brands are one size too big anyway. October is a good month to move them.
What to send us this week
With those five lines we return per-piece pricing at each volume break, the pack-out — cases, pallets, weights — and what's stock versus made to order, in 24 business hours. In October this is a scheduling conversation. In November it's a freight conversation, and nobody enjoys that one.
- Dimensions, per client or per consolidated SKU.
- Gauge — 2.5 mil is the standard mailer.
- Colour, and print or plain.
- Monthly volume by SKU for November and December.
- The destination dock.