“What If Supply Chain Made Money?”: How Abel & Cole Turned Logistics Into a Growth Strategy

We caught up recently with Ben Reardon, COO at Abel & Cole to explore how logistics is evolving beyond operational efficiency into something far more strategic. From monetising spare network capacity and funding customer acquisition to values-led fulfilment and board-level storytelling, the conversation highlighted how supply chain leaders are increasingly being asked to think like commercial operators, not just cost controllers.

Ed Lawson, The Retail Hive: We often talk about supply chain in terms of cost reduction or operational efficiency. But increasingly, are retailers starting to think about logistics as a value generator in its own right?

Ben: I’d probably go a bit further than that, actually. Historically, retailers haven’t always thought that way because logistics was seen as something internal, something you controlled in order to support the core business.

But after COVID, we started looking very differently at our network, we realised we had a huge amount of spare capacity. Customer numbers naturally dropped back from the peak, and the obvious reaction would have been to shrink the network. Cut vans, reduce cost, scale down.

But internally, supply chain conversations often default straight to cost-saving. “How do we reduce spend?” rather than asking a different question: What else could this network do?

So instead, we started delivering for Freddy’s Flowers. They have a very similar operating model to Abel & Cole and there are historical links between the businesses anyway, so operationally it made a lot of sense.

What that effectively means now is that our outbound logistics network generates around £3 million a year in additional revenue, largely by filling unused capacity within a network we already operate.

And because that revenue comes through existing infrastructure, it’s incredibly profitable.

Ed: That’s a very different way of thinking about logistics. Does it fundamentally change how the function is viewed internally?

Ben: It definitely changes the strategic conversation, for us, it forms a meaningful part of the business strategy because customer acquisition in DTC is expensive. Marketing costs are high and we’d underinvested for a few years, so customer numbers had softened.

Instead of logistics simply being seen as a support function or cost centre, it becomes something helping fund growth across the wider business. It gives us more money to spend on marketing and customer acquisition while simultaneously making our own delivery network more efficient.

If we’d simply cut half the deliveries, we’d probably also have had to cut a significant number of vans. That creates longer routes, more mileage between drops and lower operational efficiency.

By filling that spare capacity instead, we keep density high, improve profitability and make the whole network work harder.

Ed Lawson: It feels like that’s also a mindset shift. Looking at logistics as an asset to optimise commercially, rather than just a cost to minimise.

Ben: Very much so, sometimes it’s simply about challenging the assumption that you should always do what you’ve always done.

I did briefly argue internally that maybe logistics should become a profit centre rather than a cost centre, although I’ve slightly argued myself back out of that now.

The reason is that our Abel & Cole customers still have to come first. We’re not trying to become a courier business. These partner brands are piggybacking on an infrastructure we’ve already built for our own proposition.

The moment you start redesigning the operation purely to chase third-party revenue, you risk losing focus on the core customer experience.

Ed Lawson: One thing that’s increasingly interesting is how fulfilment itself becomes part of brand positioning, especially for values-led businesses.

Ben: Absolutely, and I think that’s something retailers don’t always think deeply enough about. We spend a lot of time understanding products and customer demographics, but maybe not enough time understanding which parts of the supply chain customers actually care about most.

For some customers it’s speed. For others it’s price. For us, honestly, it’s definitely not price. We’re expensive because the quality is high and we pay a fair price to our suppliers. but our customers are very values-led, and they expect the supply chain to reflect those values too.

For example, we collect all of our packaging back from customers. We actively moved away from compostable plastics, because, frankly they were terrible for the environment, and we had to reintroduce some traditional plastics into the supply chain. So we said: fine, we’ll take responsibility for them.

But to deal with it we don’t just collect back the flexible plastic packaging we send customers. We collect all their flexible plastics directly from their doorstep. That obviously comes at a cost, but our core customers recognise the value in that because it aligns with what matters to them, and that’s only possible because we fully control the supply chain ourselves.

Ed: Supply chain leaders increasingly seem to need a blend of operational expertise and commercial storytelling.

Ben: That’s something I’ve definitely learned over time. Earlier in my career, I’d go into meetings assuming the people around the table didn’t understand logistics or understand why it mattered. So I’d massively over-explain everything. Huge amounts of context, detail and operational nuance.

But fundamentally, all they cared about was the strategic importance to the business.

You have to communicate in a language people understand. There’s a sort of head-heart-wallet approach to it. You need people to emotionally understand why something matters, commercially understand the impact and feel confident in the decision.

Ed: And structurally, where does ownership of these strategic decisions sit inside the business?

Ben: For us, we’ve tried to solve that through alignment and prioritisation.

We’re a relatively small organisation, so resource matters. We can’t have five different teams all driving separate agendas at once. Interestingly, the process is actually led by the tech team. Over the last couple of years we’ve adopted OKRs across the business and it’s worked really well.

We break the year into four-month “seasons”. We define the key business results we want to achieve and then map projects and activities against those outcomes. At the start of every season, the leadership team reviews everything on the roadmap, prioritises based on available resource and aligns the business around those shared goals.

That creates much clearer focus because every project has to ladder back to a strategic outcome the business has already agreed matters.