AEO Quiet Platforms Launches a Nationwide "Asset-Light" Logistics Network

AEO Quiet Platforms Launches a Nationwide "Asset-Light" Logistics Network

After only a year in operations, American Eagle Outfitter’s Quiet Logistics Platforms has launched a nationwide delivery network. This is extremely fast timing and a little surprising.

If I had to crystallize what I think Quiet is up to here, it sounds a lot like an asset-light version of Amazon Logistics if I set out to do so. There’s no way they would have been able to launch this kind of service any other way than on the back of existing carriers.

Here are a few details about the service.

This is an interesting offering to watch because they have a lot of former Amazon talent running this service, among other experienced providers.

First, they offer a universal label. This is important because it allows all the sub-partners in the service to not only scan the same barcode throughout the journey, it also means that as a consumer you never see different tracking numbers along the journey.

Just to give you some idea how hard this is, even Amazon has not solved the universal label problem. I will return to this.

The second interesting feature is that the service is truly nationwide. All zipcodes are covered. Since USPS is the only carrier which legitimately serves all zip codes, their service must be tied into USPS for the last-mile mix at a minimum.

Third, the company mentions that it has redundancy in major markets to route around carrier issues. This is also something tricky to manage and of course the devil is in the details here. As an example, if your parcel is the one that’s delayed by a particular regional carrier, that parcel could be the one that alerts other parcels about the issue, but that doesn’t save the parcel in transit.

Fourth, and possibly one of the more interesting innovations is that the carrier decision is delayed until the edge of the network. Which means that the parcel can pass through multiple carriers hands.

Of course this creates risk! But there is opportunity here. Quiet says this could shave $1 and 1-2 days off the delivery time, but this remains to be seen in person.

At its core, however, the technology is not rocket science. It's rate shopping, but at the parcel level and perhaps even along the route (which I have seen in other startups).

An issue however with the deferred carrier decision -- how do you get volume pricing if you are rate shopping across carriers and you don’t know what carrier is going to be chosen until after the parcel is shipped?

Finally, I am sure they probably built a universal label. I am completely certain, however, that this same universal label is NOT being applied to ALL zipcodes. What are the odds the USPS with its 50 year old equipment is accepting someone else's label on their network? Exactly zero. None.

In cases where they have leverage with a smaller regional carrier, yeah this seems more feasible.

My logistics friends Andrew Benoit and David Glick contributed to this.