carriboo is fully independent. We do not resell carrier services, take referral fees, commission from suppliers or hold commercial agreements with 3PLs, freight forwarders or warehouse operators. Our revenue comes from client fees, which means recommendations are driven entirely by what's right for your business.

carriboo specialises in UK retail, e-commerce, wholesale and B2B distribution.  We've worked across fashion, homewares, sports equipment, furniture, beauty, food and giftware.  We’ve dealt with some very tricky products to ship such as bulky or high value items, as these are the most challenging areas to obtain competitive rates.

The common thread is businesses where logistics is a meaningful share of the cost base, where customer experience hinges on how the parcel arrives, and where the board want a finance-led view of the operation rather than a purely operational one.

Of course, it very much depends on your rate card, your business profile and all the other particulars to your operation.  However, we normally identify savings of 20–35% of total logistics spend in the first year, with the upper end achievable where carrier contracts haven't been benchmarked recently or where surcharges have crept in unchallenged. 

The honest answer is that the saving depends on your starting point. Businesses that have actively managed their logistics for years find smaller percentage gains than those that haven't looked at it for a while. A logistics audit (typically two to four weeks) will give you an approximate number for your business before you commit to anything bigger.

Quick Wins: for example - surcharge audits, dim-weight corrections, carrier rate renegotiation, invoice recovery - will typically deliver inside 60 to 90 days of engagement. A full tender and logistics redesign can take longer (3-6 months).

We always sequence the work so that cash savings appear early and fund the longer-term programme. No client should be paying us out of pocket for results they haven't yet seen, and we'll happily structure the contract so the early wins cover the later work.

Often, no. Our first pass is always to optimise the setup you have: renegotiate, reconfigure, remove waste rather than recommend disruption for its own sake. Carrier and warehouse changes are operationally risky and should only happen when the commercial case is overwhelming and the transition can be managed properly.

When change is genuinely needed, we run the tender or transition with you. Because we don't take a referral fee from the incoming provider, the choice is made on your numbers, not ours. Many engagements deliver the full savings without a single carrier or warehouse change.

We offer three engagement structures: a fixed-fee audit, a retainer for ongoing advisory or implementation, and for the right profile, we will offer a gainshare model where a portion of our fee is tied to verified savings.

Gainshare isn't always the right structure. It works well for clean, measurable interventions like carrier renegotiation; it works less well for structural change or start-ups.  We'll recommend the model that suits the work, not the one that maximises our fee.

We don’t operate any exclusivity contracts.  Even after we have completed a tender, you are completely free to change and alter your agreements (should you wish to) after the project is finished.  Our only ask is that you do not contact carriers with rate negotiations during the engagement phase as it causes confusion.

Three options, depending on scope.

A fixed-fee audit rate:
Dependent on volume and complexity, we will give you a written assessment of where savings exist and how to capture them, with no obligation to proceed further.

A retainer:
covers ongoing advisory or implementation support, charged monthly and scoped to the work agreed.

A gainshare arrangement:
where appropriate, ties a portion of our fees to savings actually delivered and verified against an agreed baseline.

Day rates and full project quotes are available on request once scope is clear.

Four stages.

1. Logistics audit (2–4 weeks)
where we will analyse a couple of months of carrier invoices and order profile information to identify where spend is going and where it shouldn't be.

2. Recommendations
a written report with quantified opportunities, ranked by impact, complexity and payback.

3. Implementation support
your team leads any technical work, and we stay close throughout - advising, troubleshooting and making sure nothing gets lost in translation between the commercial case and what actually gets built.

carriboo's engagements work best for businesses with annual shipping volume of 10,000 parcels a year or more, where there's enough volume to make optimisation materially worthwhile and the consulting fees pay back quickly.

However, we do have experience working with complete start-ups also but gainshare is not compatible with this type of business model.

A logistics audit takes two to four weeks. A carrier tender and potential redesign can take 3-6 months. A full network redesign or 3PL transition is six to nine months end-to-end.

We agree timelines and milestones in writing at the outset, with clear deliverables at each stage. Engagements can be paused or stopped at any milestone if priorities change - we don't lock clients into long contracts.

For an audit, we typically need three months of carrier invoices (or parcel-level data ideally), order volumes by destination, weight band and service level, returns rates and reverse logistics data, copies of current carrier and 3PL contracts is a good start.  We sign a mutual NDA before any data changes hands, and most of this can be pulled from your carrier and WMS reporting in a few hours.

If the data isn't readily available, we'll help you specify what to ask your providers for or we can scrape the information from your invoices to build a detailed view of your current costings.  We’ve faced many challenges with data and there’s nothing we haven’t yet been able to overcome.

A mutual NDA is signed before any data is shared. Customer-identifiable data is anonymised at source wherever possible.  For the analysis we do, we rarely need names or addresses, just postcodes, order weights and service levels. Data is held on UK-based, encrypted systems and deleted at the end of the engagement on request.

carriboo operates in line with UK GDPR and is registered with the ICO. We're happy to complete supplier security questionnaires and to sign data processing agreements in your standard form.  We are fully insured and have cyber security cover also.

Not usually. Most engagements run on data exports such as invoice files, order extracts, contract PDFs - that your team pulls and shares with us. We work with your IT and data security policies, not against them, and we don't ask for credentials or system access where a data export will do the job.

We are used to working with companies who have an in-house logistics team.  A full deep dive of logistics costs and operating a tender takes time, so this is a great activity to outsource and let the specialise teams focus on the day job.

We have decades of experience in logistics and finance.  We benchmark across multiple clients, carriers and 3PLs, so we know what good looks like across the market today.  We have a wealth of knowledge across many businesses and carriers whereas an in-house hire knows what good looked like at their last employer.

carriboo was co-founded by Paul and Chloe Harris. Chloe brings senior operational leadership in UK logistics, including running a logistics consultancy and direct experience designing and operating fulfilment networks for retail and e-commerce brands.

Paul is a chartered accountant with more than twenty years of post-qualification experience, including CFO of Liberty London and Head of Commercial Finance at Selfridges Group - meaning your logistics spend is reviewed by someone who has signed off retail P&Ls at scale and led major refinancings. The combination,  finance discipline plus operational depth is what makes our recommendations both commercially robust and operationally deliverable. Most consultancies have one or the other; very few have both at the partner level.

Whilst we have two full-time Founders (Paul & Chloe) we also can bring in additional support for complex projects such as Consultants with specialist customs expertise, project managers etc.