Insights from Los Mejia, Director of Distribution Operations at lululemon
When you’re moving millions of dollars of product a week out of a single distribution center, “cheapest carrier wins” stops being a strategy pretty fast. Los Mejia, Director of Distribution Operations at lululemon’s Columbus, Ohio DC, has spent nearly 25 years in supply chain — across Walmart, Target, Martin Brower, The Container Store, and now lululemon — and he’s clear-eyed about what separates a carrier that gets the business from one that doesn’t.
His answer? Whether a carrier will truly show up for the store on the other end of the shipment.
It all starts with the store.
Mejia’s Columbus facility handles retail replenishment, wholesale, and e-commerce fulfillment — all moving through the same four walls but out the door in very different ways. Retail orders get consolidated into pool carrier trailers by the dozens, deconsolidated regionally, then split down into box trucks or delivery vans to hit dense markets like Manhattan, where a full 53-foot trailer simply won’t fit. E-commerce orders move single-unit through parcel carriers like FedEx or Veho.
Different modes, same underlying question according to Mejia: is this carrier going to protect the customer experience at the very end of that chain (the store or the person unboxing a package at home)?
“The easy thing to do would be for us to just say, we can ship everything FedEx…But at the end of the day, it’s like what’s the right thing to do for our customer, which is the stores?”
Shipping everything via FedEx would simplify life on paper. It would also mean stores getting 70–80 boxes trickling in at random times instead of arriving together, ready for that week’s rollout. For Mejia, that’s a non-starter. The mode has to match what the destination actually needs, not just what’s operationally convenient.
The non-negotiables.
Ask Mejia what actually disqualifies a carrier, and the list isn’t long, but it is firm:
- Service level agreements are sacred. If a carrier commits to a processing and delivery window, lululemon builds its own store staffing and rollout schedules around that promise. A carrier that can’t consistently hit it creates a ripple effect that the DC has to absorb.
- Communication when things go wrong matters more than things never going wrong. Delays happen. Breakdowns happen. What Mejia is evaluating is whether a carrier raises the flag immediately so the team can adjust, or if they let a problem surface only when it’s already too late to fix.
- Brand and product protection is table stakes. Handing a carrier millions of dollars of product a week is an act of trust. That risk gets weighed as heavily as price or speed.
Notice what’s missing from that list: rate. It’s a factor, but it’s explicitly not the deciding one.
The story that stuck with him.
Mejia’s clearest example of a carrier getting it right came during a crisis. During the 2021 Texas winter storms, when he was still at The Container Store, an entire week of deliveries backed up as the state lost power and stores couldn’t receive product. The carrier handling the bulk of those deliveries was dealing with the exact same conditions. They were short-staffed and without power themselves, and they still showed up.
“They just basically just descended on our DC and said, ‘All right, here we are. Tell us what you need and how we’re gonna get it done.'”
That’s the partnership standard he’s still measuring against years later: a carrier that treats a shipper’s problem as a shared problem, not just a line item to service when convenient.
Why this matters beyond lululemon
Mejia’s framework dives into what any sophisticated shipper is quietly evaluating every time they hand freight to a partner. Reliability under normal conditions is the price of entry. What separates a good carrier relationship from a great one is what happens when a shipment gets complicated: a store in a dense city, a spike in e-commerce volume, or a weather event that takes out infrastructure for a week.
For brokers and carriers reading this, the takeaway is straightforward: the shippers worth keeping as long-term partners aren’t chasing the lowest quote. They’re chasing the fewest surprises.
