Omnichannel Distribution & Fulfillment Case Study
Caraway Home Feeds Modern Demand While Cutting Parcel Costs 20%
Caraway Home launched in 2019 with a deceptively simple idea: beautifully designed, nontoxic cookware sold direct to the consumer. By 2020, it had a cultural tailwind and a growing ecommerce cookware catalog. By 2025, it had evolved into a full home goods brand reaching customers through its online storefront, Amazon, and a retail network spanning major names like Target, Walmart, Crate & Barrel, Costco, Macy's, and Dillard's. Today, the company has been named a top cookware brand by Food & Wine, Good Housekeeping, and Esquire, and their commitment to creating safer kitchens and thoughtfully designed homes has earned them a loyal following that grows with every new product line.
Behind each of Caraway’s brand milestones—every limited-edition drop, every new channel, every viral moment—is a logistics operation as modern, thoughtful, and customer-focused as the products themselves.
Over the past seven years, Caraway Home and ITS Logistics have worked together to build a supply chain that is a true extension of their brand, delivering premium customer experiences while unlocking cost savings that have allowed Caraway to continue investing in their growth and business.
Results:
- Expansion from six SKUs to over 860 SKUs and new product lines
- 20% savings on parcel costs
- Comprehensive product launch operations
- Sustainability-focused reverse logistics program
Challenge
When Caraway Home began with ITS, the company was selling a small collection of nontoxic cookware through their online storefront. Today, they have over 860 SKUs spanning kitchen tools, bakeware, home organization, and beyond. As their catalog has grown, so has their distribution network.
Each new retail partner and channel arrives with unique vendor compliance requirements, case pack specifications, and inventory routing logic. Exclusive colors, retailer-specific SKUs engineered around custom packaging requirements, and shared catalog items available across multiple channels simultaneously—all have to be managed without letting any one channel pull from another's supply. While inventory management is more complex, the result is deeper relationships with retail partners and the ability to drive customer demand using marketing strategies that rely on well-developed logistics operations, like exclusive products and limited-edition releases.
The exclusive colors we have at Crate & Barrel speak to their customers so well and create something very specific to that retailer, which provides us exposure and representation in the store. We have a similar partnership with Costco—they wanted to build a bundle of particular products and colorways exclusively for their customers. We really listen to what each retailer wants and needs.
Fortunately, Caraway Home avoided one of the biggest challenges many young brands encounter during expansion: the growing pains of going omnichannel. Many 3PLs excel in either wholesale distribution or ecommerce—not both. That means when a company is ready to expand, they must first find a new provider, migrate inventory, and onboard partners when all their focus should be on channel activation. Caraway, on the other hand, has been partnering with ITS Logistics since their 2019 launch. As soon as they saw the opportunity to grow, ITS built out their omnichannel distribution operations, scaling volumes 280% in a single year.
Solution
With a single partner ready to support their growth, Caraway Home has been able to focus entirely on building their brand—developing new products, expanding retail presence, and executing high-impact product launches that drive engagement from new and returning customers—while ITS Logistics executes the operational complexity underneath.
Managing Inventory Across Multiple Channels and Retailers
ITS built and maintains vendor-specific inventory segregation within Softeon, a tier-1 warehouse management system (WMS). Custom rules govern which inventory is reserved for which channel and, where strategy allows, how shared SKUs can be reallocated when a channel runs low—keeping every retail relationship in compliance without sacrificing DTC availability. To improve visibility, Caraway also uses ITS’s proprietary supply chain management platform, ITS Engage, which provides real-time inventory level monitoring as well as inbound and outbound shipment tracking through a self-service portal.
The challenge of managing shared inventory across channels is that it's the same product, but it has to live in multiple places simultaneously. Walmart is a perfect example—some of their SKUs are exclusive, some they share with ecommerce and other retailers. We’ve built rules that give us the flexibility to move inventory between channels, while preserving dedicated SKUs. That visibility only exists because we're managing direct-to-consumer and wholesale fulfillment in one place.
Planning Perfect Product Launches
ITS and Caraway Home meet monthly to share updates on promotions and new product launches so the ITS team can adjust staffing, floor positioning, and inbound planning well before the product reaches the warehouse. For the recent waste and recycling line, ITS had visibility into the new category a year in advance—early enough to plan for the storage profile of a product that consumes more floor space than any of Caraway’s previous products.
I’d rate the team pretty highly in terms of asking the right questions and building new product logistics pipelines well ahead of time. The trash and recycling launch specifically was a great example of how much of a strength this is for ITS.
Before a new product reaches standard channels, ITS processes seeding orders: pre-launch shipments to influencers and brand ambassadors whose content is used to generate awareness and drive Caraway’s social media marketing campaigns. The coordination, timing, and operational work happen out of sight of the public while ensuring every product is unboxing-video ready.
Scaling and Optimizing Parcel Operations
There’s no such thing as too many sales, but increased order volume and the introduction of bulkier product lines led to steadily increasing parcel costs. So, in 2025, the teams collaborated on a live rate-shopping tool. Where shipping prices had previously been governed by static, weight-based rules, every order is now shopped around ITS’s network of regional and national parcel carriers for the best real-time rates. The result has been a 20% reduction in overall parcel costs with no impact on transit time, as well as streamlined invoice and audit management.
Having fulfillment and parcel both under the ITS umbrella really simplifies things for us. It’s a strategic advantage of our partnership and something we’ve enjoyed the benefits of.
Building Brand Values into Reverse Logistics
For a lot of companies, returns processing is binary: restock or damage out. The approach results in perfectly functional products ending up in landfills, which doesn't align with Caraway's sustainability goals. Instead, ITS and Caraway Home built a custom returns program that redirects more products back into the market. Resalable items return to stock. Items with cosmetic damage but functional product are listed on a secondary marketplace. Products that can't be resold are donated to Habitat for Humanity directly out of ITS’s distribution centers—a partnership Caraway launched in 2022 that has generated enough value to fund the construction of multiple homes. This is all supported by a seamless reverse logistics experience for customers, including the increasingly popular buy online, return in-store (BORIS) option for retail partners who sell Caraway products through their own online storefronts.
Results
With ITS Logistics, Caraway Home has built one of the most complex and sophisticated omnichannel supply chains in home goods—and the numbers reflect their success.
What ITS and Caraway Cooked Up:
- 20% reduction in total parcel costs through small parcel consolidation and live rate-shopping implementation
- 14,333% SKU growth—from 6 to over 860 and growing—including retailer-specific SKUs and new product lines
- Collaborative product launch playbook that unlocks more efficient supply chain planning and better experiences for end customers
- Custom reverse logistics workflows that ensure Caraway’s brand values are aligned with every step of their supply chain
We continue to grow with ITS Logistics because they’ve been a strong partner and a great collaborator.