ATLANTA, June 12, 2020 -- Today, we are incredibly excited to announce that Stord has acquired Cove Logistics—a leading transportation provider—to further expand our distribution platform to include freight, strengthen our network of logistics capabilities, and better serve our customers.
Stord is on a mission to help leading companies build and scale optimized, cloud-based supply chains. Since our launch, we have been laser-focused on improving our customers’ warehousing networks to optimize the placement of their inventory. In doing this, we have been fortunate to partner with leading shippers such as Dollar General, Advance Auto Parts, Intertape Polymer Group, Crystal Geyser, Owens Corning, and more—which have led our distribution network to only increase in capability, reach, and scale.
After launching our model with warehousing and facilitating thousands of shipments in our network annually, it became evident that our customers needed less friction between holding their inventory and moving their inventory—the handoff from the warehouse operator to the truck driver. Simply put, everything coming into our warehouses, and everything going out, unless parcel/courier, is moved on a truck. Additionally, as we layer in more network design and inventory placement optimization for our customers, we needed to offer increased freight capabilities to enable the re-balancing of inventories across networks.
To truly serve as an end-to-end platform for our customers, STORD has set out to vertically integrate down the value chain and is proud to launch our freight capabilities through this acquisition.
When we met the team, we knew it was a unique match that we had to move quickly on. Cove was started by a former UPS Freight executive who built the company to be a leading outsourced freight provider, truly delivering on their customer commitments, instead of just another transactional brokerage. The team has seamlessly executed tens of thousands of shipments annually across a carrier base of 15k+ drivers. They have achieved this by focusing on meticulous operations, customer-obsession, and taking care of their suppliers — all key values of STORD as well.
We’re excited to officially welcome Cove Logistics to the STORD family and formally launch our freight capabilities—bringing together two truly customer-obsessed cultures to build the leading distribution network.
Moving forward, we will be integrating our freight offering into our distribution platform so customers can seamlessly manage the movement of their goods in and out of our warehouses with instant pricing, enhanced visibility, and consolidated operations.
Our full-service distribution network of 400+ facilities and 15k+ carriers is built to handle end-to-end supply chains by offering an integrated and cloud-based solution for: warehousing, fulfillment, full-truckload freight, less-than-truckload freight, and intermodal shipping. This not only gives us the ability to serve our customers end-to-end, but enables us to automate many of the most challenging and manual operations for our shippers—such as dock appointment scheduling and driver waiting time. When your warehouses and carriers operate as part of the same, agile network, on the same platform, those friction points are removed, leading to increased efficiency and savings.
This is a significant milestone and a testament to our hard work, but we are all looking forward to the future and recognize that we are only at the beginning of building a global, collaborative logistics network.
A sincere thank you to our customers, incredible team, investors, and network of service providers who have chosen to partner with us on this journey; we couldn’t be more grateful.
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Read more in the press release.