THE BLOG
Ship Happens. We talk about it.
Recent Posts
Girls’ Girls Work In Supply Chain: Angela Armonda
Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Angela Armonda
The World Is Selling More Honey Than Bees Can Make
Honey always felt like the thing in my pantry I never had to think about, because it comes from bees, and how complicated can a bee be? And like, I knew the basics from 10th grade biology, but it seems my teacher left out some truly crazy details. To make a single pound of honey, bees visit around two million flowers and fly something like 55,000 miles (over 88,000 km), and one worker bee makes about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her entire life, which is a wild amount of effort for something that ends up in a plastic bear next to the peanut butter. And yes, it's always her, because every worker bee is female, while the males, called drones, don't make any honey at all and get kicked out of the hive every fall once food runs low.
What my teacher definitely didn't mention is that bees have a production limit, and the global honey market is selling more than that limit allows. Once you follow honey from the hive to the shelf, the math just isn't mathing, and the gap gets filled with some very creative supply chain work.
Back at the Dock: A Driver Wait Time Update
There hasn’t been a lot of talk about driver wait time lately, so does that mean it’s no longer an issue? Sadly, no. It hasn’t gotten much better since the last time I wrote about this in Jan 2025, it’s just dropped down the priority list in this current trucking hellscape we’re all dealing with. Are drivers still concerned about wait time? Yes, but they’re more concerned about several other issues that have gotten a lot louder in the last 18 months. So let’s revisit trucking wait time: how the numbers have changed, what governments have done to try and deal with it, what tech could do to help, and what concerns are trumping this very costly issue.
Gorgeous Girls In Supply Chain: Krista Guillory
Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Krista Guillroy
I Sold My Car to Fund My Brokerage, and I'm Not the Only One
I'll admit that for years I read funding announcements and assumed I'd missed some memo about how real founders get started, and I have a feeling a lot of women founders can relate. So I want to talk about money: how businesses in logistics actually get funded, why so little venture capital ever reaches women, and what the rest of us have been doing instead.
I started my brokerage in 2016, and I was lucky enough to have two silent partners support me for the first little while. Even with their help, I blew through both of my credit cards and a line of credit, and eventually I sold my car to make it all work.
Gorgeous Girls In Supply Chain: Lexi Farris-Coomes
Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Lexi Farris-Coomes
Who’s Data is it Anyway?
Let's talk about your data, and whether you truly, fully own it. As technology advances we keep signing on to more and more SaaS products that have access to what we do, and I'm not just talking about work. Social media knows so much about me that it can tell when I need to get my hair done, and right on cue the inspo pics start showing up in my Pinterest feed. That one's a fair trade at least, we hand the platform our data and in exchange we get entertainment, information, and connection to other people. But the tools you run your business on are a different conversation, because when you sign on with a logistics SaaS company, what is actually happening to your data? Let's talk about the tech that carriers, brokers, and shippers are using every day, and what's happening to the abundance of data all of it is producing.
Hot Topics from CoCreate by Alibaba.com
Last week I had the privilege of attending my second CoCreate by Alibaba.com, and this time I was invited to be on a panel called "The Female Founder Meetup: Scaling Brands, Capital, and Community." Thank you to everyone who came out, because I might be biased, but we had a sharp, engaged audience that made the whole thing better than I ever thought it could be.
During my two days of hallway chats, coffee meet-ups, and after-panel discussions, I noticed the same topics kept coming up. So here are the eleven hottest topics.
Gorgeous Girls In Supply Chain: Joanna Pachnik
Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Joanna Pachnik
The Idea That Won’t Go Away
Some of the best people I know in the industry just took the plunge into being founders, and I could not be happier about it.
Four of them, people I have watched operate for a while now and respect enormously, left comfortable, familiar setups to do it together. From the outside that may look reckless. From the inside it is the most obvious thing in the world, and I know that because I have been on the inside of it myself. Ship Happens started the same way, as an idea I could not talk myself out of no matter how sensible I tried to be.
Gorgeous Girls In Supply Chain: Zoe Upson
Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Zoe Upson
Everything About Vanilla Is Harder Than It Should Be
So not a lot of my professional network knows this but I really enjoy baking but with the lifestyle I lead as a digital nomad, that’s a hard hobby to regularly enjoy. So whenever I have a place with an oven and the basics I need to create a sweet treat, I indulge myself. But some ingredients are harder to find than others, butter, eggs, sugar, flour, no problem but vanilla? Like real vanilla? That is a challenge, and that is what this post is all about. What is vanilla, where does it come from, how does it get to store shelves and what should buyers and consumers know when purchasing this unique and frankly under-rated flavour ingredient.
The Stuff Holding My Digital Nomad Life Together
I run a freight brokerage and Ship Happens, and for those that have been around for a while, you know that I do it all as a digital nomad. The Instagram version of digital nomad life skips the part where you're reconciling calendars across three timezones and making sure a client call doesn't land at 3am your time, so the systems are the only reason I am able to keep everything on track and running smoothly (most of the time). Here's the actual stack and these are not the aspirational ones, these tools that survived this unconventional lifestyle.
Gorgeous Girls In Supply Chain: Mia Mazal
Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Mia Mazal
What Beginners Should Know About Shipping Temperature Sensitive Freight
Cold chain is one of those phrases that sounds fancier than it is. Strip away the jargon and it just means keeping a product inside the temperature range it needs from the second it leaves the shipper to the second it lands at its destination, with no changes in between. The moment it’s broken by getting too warm (or too cold), the product can be compromised whether it still looks fine or not.
The tricky part for smaller shippers is that everything cold is not the same cold. Frozen goods ship at -18°C or lower, chilled products like dairy and a lot of pharma live in the 2–8°C window, and some things just need to stay "cool" and stable in the 15–25°C range. Get the range wrong, let it drift for too long, and you're looking at spoilage, rejected loads, or in some cases products that legally can't be sold.
Gorgeous Girls In Supply Chain: Holly LaBoda
Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Holly LaBoda
What Is the First Mile? And Why the Last Mile Always Gets the Spotlight
Everybody in this industry loves to talk about the last mile. It is the one the customer actually sees, the one with the delivery apps and the little truck icon crawling across a map, and the one that gets all kinds of conference panels and attention. The first mile gets almost none of that attention, which is funny to me since it’s where all supply chains start.
The first mile seems to be more difficult to define, depending on who you ask and where they are in the chain. Its truest definition is that it is the very start of everything, raw goods coming out of the source and heading somewhere that turns them into product: produce leaving the field for the packing house, ore coming out of the ground toward the smelter, fish off the boat and into the processing plant, etc.
The $10 Billion Trade That Can't Answer One Question: Who’s Hair is This?
I've never gotten hair extensions, but I came close once. Mid-twenties, a truly brutal haircut, and the hard-won discovery that the bob is not for me. In the end the price tag talked me out of it and I grew out my mistake the slow way. What I know now is that the price was the least interesting question I could have asked about extensions.
Before I go any further, one thing needs to be said. This post is not about shaming anyone who wears extensions or wigs. Hair is personal, it's cultural, and for a lot of people it's non-negotiable. This is about the supply chain behind the product, because it has a traceability problem that would get any other industry dragged, and somehow it barely gets talked about at all.
Gorgeous Girls In Supply Chain: Claudia Beumer
Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Claudia Beumer
How to Survive a TMS Demo (Without Buying Something You Don't Need)
If you've been in logistics for longer than about five minutes, you already know the drill. Some rep from a TMS company you've never heard of has found your email, your LinkedIn, and possibly your cell, and they are very excited to book you a fifteen-minute demo that will somehow take an hour and change your life.
Before you cave just to make the follow-ups stop, let's talk about what a TMS actually is, whether you need one, and how to figure out in one call whether the person pitching you is selling something real or just something expensive.
A TMS, transportation management system, is software that pulls the moving parts of your freight into one place instead of spreading them across seventeen browser tabs, three inboxes, and a spreadsheet you're holding together with hope and colour-coding. At its simplest, it helps you rate, book, track, and settle shipments in one spot. The better ones layer on reporting so you can actually see what you're spending and where.