Primary Audience: West Midlands DTC founders (Birmingham/Black Country/Coventry corridor)
Summary: Everyone’s talking about new warehouse space again, but your delivery performance still comes down to boring fundamentals: stock truth, cut-offs, pick accuracy, and carrier rules.
Suggested Posting Day: Monday
If you’re a West Midlands founder, you’ll hear a lot of noise right now about “more warehouse space coming online”.
Fair. The big sheds matter.
But what I see from a Birmingham operation is this: more square footage doesn’t fix messy fulfilment.
Savills’ latest Big Shed Briefing coverage put UK take-up for 100,000 sq ft+ logistics units at 33.05m sq ft in 2025, and build-to-suit activity up again — with the West Midlands at 11% of BTS transactions.
Good news for the region.
Bad news if you think a bigger building automatically means better service.
Mini example: a local DTC brand moved into a larger unit and still missed despatch every other day because they hadn’t sorted three basics:
- One SKU list (not three versions across Shopify, Amazon, and a spreadsheet)
- A real daily cut-off time (not “we’ll try”)
- Simple carrier rules by size/value (so the pack bench isn’t guessing)
Once those were in place, the building finally started working like a system — not a room full of boxes.
Practical takeaway: before you spend money on more space, spend one day documenting your ‘order to van’ process. If you can’t explain it on one page, you can’t scale it.
What’s the first thing that breaks in your fulfilment when orders spike — stock accuracy, picking, packing, or carrier handover?
Source Notes:
- Warehouse & Logistics News summary of Savills Big Shed Briefing stats (UK take-up 33.05m sq ft in 2025; West Midlands 11% of BTS transactions): https://warehousenews.co.uk/2026/01/take-up-27-ahead-of-pre-covid-average/