A catalog that could not ship: rebuilding around dangerous-goods rules

The brand made ninety-eight products and could reliably sell twenty-two of them. The rest sat in one of several holds: documentation rejected by the dangerous-goods review, storage limits that capped how much flammable stock could be held at a time, or a classification that excluded them from the fast fulfillment programs the category's shoppers filter by.

Nobody owned the problem because it did not look like a marketing problem. Meanwhile every growth plan the brand wrote — new campaigns, new content, new launches — was being drawn up for a catalog that was three quarters unavailable, and the shortfall was blamed on advertising performance for two years running.

We treated the fulfillment constraint as the growth strategy, because it was.

• Safety data sheets rebuilt to specification — the majority of rejections were formatting and missing-field failures, not the products themselves.
• Classification reviewed product by product, with several items reclassified correctly into a less restricted handling tier.
• Split fulfillment design — the genuinely restricted items routed through a merchant-fulfilled process with realistic handling times, so they stay sellable instead of disappearing.
• Replenishment rebuilt around storage limits, sending smaller and more frequent shipments rather than hitting the cap and stopping.

Sellable SKUs went from 22 to 74 and revenue more than tripled to $307k a month.

Nothing in this project was a marketing idea. Rebuilding paperwork to a specification, correcting classifications and rerouting the genuinely restricted items released a catalog that had been finished and warehoused for years. Out-of-stock days fell 81% once replenishment was designed around the storage caps instead of colliding with them every month.