The first Vulpine shipment to the United States was packed on my kitchen table in Graz, carried to the post office in a backpack, and shipped via Austrian Post. The tracking number was handwritten on a sticky note. The customs declaration was filled out by me, using Google to confirm I was using the correct harmonized tariff code.
Two years later, we were manufacturing in Poland, fulfilling from warehouses in Austria and the United States, and shipping to customers across two continents. The staff was still two people. The kitchen table was still occasionally used for packing.
Building a global supply chain as a two-person operation sounds impressive. It was mostly just relentless problem-solving, one small crisis at a time.
Finding the Right Manufacturer
The manufacturer search started with a spreadsheet and ended with a relationship.
I contacted multiple manufacturers across several countries. The criteria were specific: minimum order quantities under 500 units, willingness to work with a brand-new company, quality standards that matched our testing requirements, and communication in English or German.
Nine didn’t respond. Two responded with minimum orders of 5,000 units — beyond our budget and risk tolerance. Two responded positively. One of those turned out to be a broker rather than a manufacturer, which I discovered only after two weeks of email exchanges.
The remaining one — a smaller factory willing to work at our scale. Not enthusiastically, but willingly. The minimum order was 200 units. The pricing was reasonable. The quality samples were good.
The partnership almost didn’t happen because I treated the initial approach like a business transaction rather than a relationship. My first email was a formal specification document. Their first response was polite but distant. The second visit — where I built the relationship over dinner rather than specifications — changed everything. They became our primary manufacturer for the entire life of Vulpine, and the quality of their work was central to our 4.9-star rating.
The Dual-Fulfillment System
Shipping from Austria to the US was expensive, slow, and customs-complicated. Shipping from the US to the US was cheap, fast, and simple. The obvious solution: have inventory on both continents.
The non-obvious part: managing two fulfillment points as a two-person company with no logistics expertise.
Here’s the system we built:
Production run: Manufacturer in Poland produces the full order. Ships 60% to our Austrian warehouse (a rented storage unit, not a proper warehouse). Ships 40% directly to our US fulfillment partner.
European fulfillment: Orders from Amazon EU are fulfilled from the Austrian storage. I packed and shipped these myself for the first eight months. Then I hired a part-time helper. Then Amazon FBA took over when our volume justified the fees.
US fulfillment: Orders from Amazon US are fulfilled by a third-party logistics partner in the US. They receive inventory, store it, and ship individual orders. We never touch the US inventory after it arrives at their facility.
Inventory management: A shared spreadsheet (yes, a spreadsheet) tracked units across both locations. Every Monday, I reconciled the numbers: units shipped to fulfillment, units sold, units in transit, units in production. The reconciliation took thirty minutes and prevented the most common supply chain failure for small companies: running out of stock.
The system thinking that made this work wasn’t sophisticated. It was consistent. The same thirty-minute inventory check every Monday. The same production order process every quarter. The same quality inspection protocol for every shipment. Boring. Reliable. Effective.
What Nobody Warns You About
Customs is a language. Harmonized tariff codes, certificates of origin, customs valuations, duty rates, import taxes — each country has its own system, and getting any element wrong can delay your shipment by weeks or add unexpected costs. Our first US shipment was held in customs for eleven days because I’d misclassified the product on the customs declaration. The classification difference: 3.2% duty vs. 8.7% duty. The cost of the error: delay plus a higher duty rate that applied to the entire shipment.
Cash flow gaps are structural. You pay the manufacturer 30-60 days before you receive revenue from the sale. For a production run of EUR 15,000, this means EUR 15,000 leaves your account before a single unit sells. If the sales take longer than expected, the gap becomes a chasm. The profit first system was essential for managing this: the production account was funded before the production order was placed, so the cash was always there.
Quality control at distance is hard. When your manufacturer is 800 kilometers away, you can’t walk onto the factory floor to check a production run. We solved this with detailed inspection protocols sent to the manufacturer, sample pulls from every batch shipped to us for verification, and twice-yearly in-person visits to the factory. The protocols were tedious to create and essential to maintain. Every time we relaxed them, quality issues appeared within two production cycles.
Shipping damages are inevitable. Products that survive your testing lab may not survive a postal carrier’s sorting facility. We redesigned our packaging three times after discovering that products arrived damaged despite being perfectly packed by our standards. The third packaging design included custom inserts that added EUR 0.40 per unit but reduced shipping damage to near zero. That EUR 0.40 prevented an incalculable number of negative reviews and returns.
The Scale That Worked
Two people running a global supply chain sounds like either an achievement or a warning sign, depending on your perspective. It was both.
The achievement: we proved that modern tools — Amazon FBA, third-party logistics, international shipping platforms, cloud-based inventory management — make global distribution accessible to tiny companies. You don’t need a logistics department. You need a system, a spreadsheet, and thirty minutes every Monday.
The warning sign: the supply chain was entirely dependent on me. I was the single point of failure — the person who knew the manufacturer’s phone number, the customs codes, the fulfillment partner’s process, the inventory reconciliation method. This was the owner dependency problem in its most operational form.
When we prepared for the exit, documenting the supply chain was the most time-consuming part of the transition. Every relationship, every process, every contact that existed only in my head had to be written down, organized, and transferred. The work of documentation took eight weeks — work that would have taken one week if I’d documented as I went.
The lesson: build the documentation alongside the system, not after it. The thirty minutes you spend documenting today saves the eight weeks you’ll spend reconstructing later.
For Founders Starting Out
If you’re building a physical product business from a small base, here’s what I know:
Start by shipping yourself. Pack the orders. Walk to the post office. Feel the weight of inventory and the cost of packaging materials. This direct contact with the physical reality of your business teaches you things that no logistics partner can.
Upgrade one element at a time. Don’t go from kitchen-table packing to Amazon FBA in one step. Graduate from packing yourself to a part-time helper. Then to a local fulfillment partner. Then to Amazon FBA. Each step teaches you the system before you hand it to someone else.
Choose your manufacturer like a partner. You will work with this person for years. Their quality becomes your reputation. Their reliability becomes your customer experience. A manufacturer who costs 10% more but communicates clearly, delivers reliably, and cares about quality is worth exponentially more than a cheap manufacturer who doesn’t.
Build the spreadsheet from day one. Track every unit. Every shipment. Every cost. The data from the first six months will inform every supply chain decision you make for the next three years.
The kitchen table is a perfectly good starting point. The global supply chain is a perfectly achievable destination. The path between them is built one solved problem at a time.
