Wholesale brands have had to get used to operating through uncertainty.
A few years ago, it was COVID. More recently, tariffs have forced brands to rethink sourcing, pricing, and inventory planning. Add in factory delays, warehouse disruptions, shifting retailer demand, and the occasional natural disaster, and it becomes clear that disruption is inevitable.
It’s impossible for your brand to predict a crisis before it happens. But you can build the habits, systems, and teams that make a crisis easier to manage. That’s operational resilience. It’s having the margin to pause, understand what changed, and make smart decisions.
That idea came through clearly in our conversation with Grant Mahan from Sunski during our Between The Drops podcast. Grant runs sales operations for the brand, which puts him close to the systems, fulfillment partners, wholesale orders, DTC demand, inventory workflows, and retailer expectations that keep the business moving.
When the conversation turned to tariffs, COVID, 3PL challenges, LA fires, bonded warehouses, manufacturing diversification, and cost control, Grant’s advice was refreshingly practical and familiar.
“Don’t panic.”
For wholesale brands, that might be the best place to start.
When something unexpected hits, the pressure to react quickly is real. Retailers want updates, sales want direction, operations want to know what changes, finance wants to understand the cost, and leadership wants a plan. But a fast reaction usually creates more problems if your team does not understand the full picture first.
Grant talked about tariffs as one of those moments where Sunski had to stop and work through the options. The team considered bonded warehouses, Canadian fulfillment, manufacturing alternatives, and pricing changes. They had to sort through which ideas were worth exploring and which created too much complexity for the type of product Sunski sells.
But taking a beat does not mean moving slowly. It means moving with purpose to create clarity, asking better questions before making a move. Which orders are affected? Which accounts need communication first? What is the real financial impact? Which options are practical, and which ones only look good in theory?
A calm, rational, approach centered around the tangible business impacts of the changes being considered is an operational advantage.
Good tools are a large part of your brand's business. You likely have an ERP, a B2B platform, a 3PL network, and a planning process. Those tools help your team see orders, inventory, fulfillment status, and channel demand. But when disruption hits, your brand still needs people who can interpret the information and make good decisions.
Grant talked about the importance of having “good people to work with that are problem solvers.” That may sound simple, but it is one of the most important parts of operational resilience. Specifically, you want people that can work together across departments.
During COVID, Sunski had to think differently about wholesale, DTC, advertising, cost control, and retailer demand. During the LA fires, one of its warehouse partners dealt with rolling blackouts that affected fulfillment. During tariff uncertainty, the team had to work through questions that touched sourcing, logistics, warehousing, and pricing.
No single department could solve those issues alone.
Resilient brands build trust across sales, operations, finance, fulfillment, and leadership before the pressure hits. When your team is used to sharing information and working across departments, your business has a much better chance of staying steady when something breaks.
One of the clearest lessons from the Sunski conversation is that resilient brands create backup paths before they need them.
Grant talked about manufacturing diversification as part of Sunski’s tariff preparation. The brand had historically made product in China, but it was already working with factories in other countries. The goal wasn’t to move everything at once, but to have alternatives.
Operational resilience does not always mean making a dramatic change. Sometimes it means giving the business more than one path forward. A brand may diversify manufacturing, use more than one 3PL, support both wholesale and DTC demand, or build a replenishment strategy that gives retailers more flexibility in season.
Grant shared a similar point about fulfillment. Sunski uses different 3PL partners for different parts of the business because wholesale and DTC fulfillment do not always require the same strengths. One partner may be better suited for wholesale orders and routing requirements, while another may be better suited for direct-to-consumer volume.
That kind of channel-aware thinking reduces risk. If every order, shipment, or production plan depends on one single path, then it’s fragile. A single disruption can put your whole business under pressure.
No brand wants to have to deal with a sudden crisis, but difficult moments often expose problems that were already there.
Grant talked about Sunski’s experience when Stitch Labs, the inventory and order management platform the brand had been using, was sunset after being acquired. Sunski suddenly had a deadline to move off a system that had become a central connection point for orders and fulfillment. At the same time, the brand was also dealing with a 3PL relationship that was not working well.
That was a lot to handle at once.
But Grant did not describe the experience only as a setback. He called it “a good kick in the rear end to get going.” Sunski eventually moved to ZoroSoft and built a stronger operational foundation, with cleaner data and better flexibility for directing orders to the right fulfillment partners.
Many wholesale brands have a version of this story. It might not even be a crisis like the forced sunset of a key system. It could just be growing pains for your brand. The old workflow works until the business grows past it. The spreadsheet works until too many people depend on it. The ordering system works until volume exposes every manual step.
A disruption might force a short-term fix, but it can also show the brand where a stronger process is overdue. Operational resilience means paying attention, and working to identify those weak spots before they become a problem.
COVID taught Sunski a lot about cost control.
When retailers were closed and wholesale demand became uncertain, Sunski had to look closely at how the business operated. Grant shared that one of the founders gave him a company-wide cost control project during that period. At the time, it was partly a response to pressure. But the work created lessons the team still uses.
That is a valuable reminder for wholesale brands. Cost discipline is much easier to build before the business is in panic mode.
Brands should understand where hidden costs live. That might be fulfillment fees, manual order cleanup, unnecessary system complexity, rushed shipments, poor inventory visibility, or workflows that require too much internal labor. Some costs are easy to see. Others only become obvious when the business is under stress.
The goal isn’t to cut everything and reduce cost for its own sake, but to know what matters, what creates drag, and where the business has room to make better decisions.
Forecasting came up several times in our conversation with Grant, especially in relation to 3PLs. Sunski meets regularly with its fulfillment partners, and those conversations help everyone understand what is coming.
“The more information you give them accurately, the better that they can be,” Grant said.
A simple point, but one that is easy to overlook. A forecast does not have to be perfect to help the business. It gives warehouse teams a better starting point, enaables operations to plan for order volume, and helps sales and fulfillment align around key shipping windows.
During disruption, that shared view becomes even more valuable.
If tariffs affect cost, a better forecast helps the brand understand which products and channels are most exposed. If a warehouse issue slows fulfillment, the team can prioritize key orders more clearly. If a factory delay affects a seasonal category, reps can communicate with accounts before the problem becomes a surprise.
Forecasting does not eliminate uncertainty. It gives the team a better way to respond when conditions change. And smart brands continually revisit and revise their forecasts.
Operational resilience depends on visibility into your wholesale channel for everyone involved. Brands need to know what orders are coming in, what inventory is available, which retailers need support, and how information moves between systems.
When those pieces are disconnected, every disruption becomes harder to manage. Teams spend too much time reconciling spreadsheets, chasing order status, or manually fixing process gaps. That slows down the response at the exact moment when the brand needs clarity.
A connected wholesale operation makes it easier for reps, retailers, and internal teams to work from the same information. The ERP, B2B platform, inventory data, and fulfillment workflows should support the momentum a brand needs to move through crisis, not create competing versions of the truth that make turning the ship sluggish.
This is where a modern wholesale B2B platform can help, especially when brands are managing seasonal buys, replenishment, rep tools, retailer self-service, and ERP-connected order workflows. The platform doesn’t replace good decision-making, but it consolidates all that necessary data into one, easy to view spot, and gives teams cleaner information when they need to move quickly.
The next disruption probably won’t look like the last one. It may not be a pandemic, a tariff shift, a warehouse issue, or a factory delay. It may be something smaller, or something specific to your brand, that still creates a major operational headache.
Build in operational resilience before the crisis.
Brands can start by looking at the places where the operation already feels fragile. Which workflows depend too much on one person? Which systems do not talk to each other? Where do reps lack visibility? Where does fulfillment need more advance notice? Which orders require manual cleanup every season?
Those answers point to the work that needs to happen next.
Grant’s experience at Sunski is a reminder that resilience is practical. It shows up in regular 3PL communication, better forecasting, cleaner systems, manufacturing alternatives, cost awareness, and a team that can pause before reacting, then coordinate across departments.
Wholesale brands cannot prepare for everything. But they can build a business that responds with more confidence when something changes.
Operational resilience is a brand’s ability to keep selling, fulfilling, communicating, and making good decisions when something disrupts the business. In wholesale, that could include supply chain delays, tariffs, inventory issues, 3PL problems, retailer closures, factory changes, or sudden shifts in demand.
Wholesale brands depend on connected teams and systems. Sales, operations, inventory, fulfillment, retailers, reps, ERP systems, and B2B platforms all need to work together. When one part breaks, the impact can spread quickly. Operational resilience helps brands respond faster and reduce the damage.
Brands can prepare by improving forecasting, building strong 3PL relationships, keeping clean inventory data, and creating more flexibility across manufacturing or fulfillment where possible. The goal is to create options before the business is under pressure.
Forecasting gives brands and partners a clearer view of expected demand. It helps teams plan inventory, prepare for shipping volume, communicate with fulfillment partners, and identify risks earlier. A forecast does not need to be perfect to be useful. It needs to help teams make better decisions when conditions change.
3PL partners can only plan well if they know what is coming. Regular communication helps them prepare for volume, labor needs, routing requirements, and important wholesale orders. When disruption happens, a strong relationship with the 3PL can make it easier to adjust quickly.
A B2B wholesale platform can improve resilience by giving reps, retailers, and operations teams better access to product content, pricing, inventory, order history, prebook orders, and replenishment workflows. When wholesale data is easier to access and connected to the ERP, teams can respond with more confidence.
Common signs include manual order cleanup, disconnected systems, unclear inventory visibility, overreliance on one fulfillment path, surprise volume for 3PLs, slow retailer communication, and important account details living in emails or spreadsheets. These issues may feel manageable during normal seasons, but they become much riskier during disruption