The Invisible Engine: Why Logistics Still Has To Fight For a Seat at the Table

We caught up recently with Rachael Williams, fractional supply chain director for multiple brands including, American Golf, Piglet in Bed, Lulu Guinness and Gain the Edge Socks, to explore why logistics teams are increasingly shaping customer experience, despite still often being viewed internally as an operational function rather than a strategic one. From delivery choice and AI-driven shopping journeys to scaling for peaks and protecting customer trust, the conversation highlighted the growing tension between what logistics enables and how it is perceived inside retail businesses.

Ed Lawson, The Retail Hive: One thing that keeps coming up when I speak to supply chain leaders is that logistics underpins so much of the customer experience, yet it often still struggles to be viewed as a strategic value driver internally. Does that resonate?

Rachael: The challenge is that logistics often still isn’t perceived as a value-add function. Particularly at board level, you’re sometimes seen as simply executing a plan rather than shaping customer experience or commercial outcomes.

If you don’t have everybody buying into the value logistics creates, it becomes really difficult internally. You end up fighting those battles across the business, and you see that siloed approach in a lot of companies. Everybody works within their own area, communication breaks down and then suddenly none of it becomes easy execution anymore.

Ed: And increasingly the customer doesn’t really distinguish between brand, fulfilment and convenience anymore. They just experience the outcome.

Rachael: Exactly. And I think that’s where some of the conversations around agentic AI become really interesting. Customers are going to become much more intentional about how they shop and how they receive products. I had an experience this week with an order from another retailer that didn’t work particularly well, and afterwards I realised I would actually have preferred the option to collect it from a nearby locker, but that option wasn’t available.

Customers are becoming much more aware of those fulfilment choices. They’ll increasingly make decisions based not just on the product itself, but on what works best for their lifestyle and convenience.

Ed: So fulfilment flexibility is becoming part of brand preference itself, not just a back-end operational decision?

Rachael: Things like locker collection, pickup options and delivery flexibility are becoming part of the customer decision-making process much earlier. Customers will start making choices based on those experiences first.

And from a logistics perspective, we sit underneath all of it. We are the thing enabling those customer promises.

Ed: Tell us about how you manage that when both business and customer needs change? 

Rachael: You obviously get demand spikes, availability challenges and peak periods where you’re constantly flexing operations up and down. But operationally, what matters is having the infrastructure and processes in place to handle that consistently.

I used to say this to buyers all the time when I worked at Joules. Someone would say, “But the hare on this product has changed colour,” and I’d think: operationally, that doesn’t really matter to me. It’s still arriving in a bag in a box and going out in a bag, what matters is whether the operation can scale and flex to support the customer experience.

That’s why logistics and customer experience are intrinsically linked. We are the function that has to dial things up when demand changes, while still maintaining the service customers expect.

And actually, that’s where logistics becomes incredibly powerful when it’s brought into the conversation early enough.