Conversations at Manifest last week reinforced our belief in the path we've been taking at Slotted over the past few months. Focusing on tools and functionality that bring clarity and structure around fulfillment pricing and proposals. 

This means:

• Getting Providers to "no" faster with the wrong opportunities and to "yes" more confidently with the right opportunities.

• Enabling brands and consultants to execute pricing activities and evaluations in a standardized and structured way.

BUT those conversations also reinforced that many people still believe Slotted is purely lead generation and matchmaking. Which is fair given what our conversations looked like at Manifest is 2025. If this is how you see Slotted, I'd love to reintroduce ourselves.

What's trending

FedEx has been busy the past few weeks.

They’re refining who they want to serve and how they want the network to run going into 2026.

📦 They’re stepping back from chasing broad, lower-margin e-commerce volume and leaning further into higher-value verticals

📦 Network 2.0 integration is still moving forward, with Express and Ground consolidation aimed at simplifying the operating structure and tightening cost control. The planned spin-off of FedEx Freight is also progressing.

Pre-Launch and Early Growth Brands Value Finding the Right Partners Early

📦 About 40% of brands who have come to Slotted from our partnership with Startup CPG are pre-launch or shipping under 500 D2C orders a month. They're looking for the right person at the right time.

📦 The consistent topic of conversation is their desire to find the right provider, understand the cost impacts, and make an informed decision. What isn't top of mind... "Lowest Cost".

Opportunities in Fulfillment

Partner Highlight: Switchboard

New customer. Different tech stack.

Manual data entry between systems.

Onboarding slowed down by integration bottlenecks.

Switchboard helps fix that.

Switchboard is already embedded within Slotted to help brands quickly and securely share historical order profile data with prospective providers. But the real value shows up once a provider is live and operating day to day.

Switchboard is a scalable integration layer between your WMS, ERP, or IMS and the systems around you.

Customer ERPs, marketplaces, carriers, and B2B portals. Instead of building one-off connections every time you onboard a new client, you plug into a standardised framework that flexes where needed.

Where providers typically see the biggest impact

• Customer onboarding integrations (faster go-live, fewer custom builds)

• PO/invoice ingestion and automated order creation within your WMS/ERP (PDF, email, portal, EDI)

• ASN and shipment data sync

• Invoice sync back to customer ERP

• Label generation and carrier schedule data flows

• Inventory feeds

Instead of manually entering customer POs or invoices, Switchboard's AI tool can ingests them, validate key fields, and automatically creates clean orders in your system. Your team only handles exceptions.

For teams without a large development function, or teams who want engineers focused on core systems, Switchboard removes complexity while keeping flexibility.

Faster onboarding. Less manual admin work. Infrastructure that scales as your operation grows.