The Operators: Inside Operating Crew with Yan Sim and Xunyu Foo
Yan Sim scaled logistics at Warby Parker and Weee!, Xunyu Foo pivoted from a legal background and spent half a decade growing Stone and Strand. Together they run an advisory that sees inside dozens of consumer brands at once. A conversation about the four words founders fall for, a packaging line worth a tenth of a company's operating income, and why the big RFP almost never works.
By Maya Bodinger, GTM Lead at Prysmic · August 2026 · 9 min read
The first two conversations in The Operators were with CEOs running consumer brands at scale. This one is with the people those CEOs call. Yan Sim spent a decade scaling logistics at Warby Parker and Weee!, then founded Operating Crew and partnered with Xunyu Foo, who spent half a decade scaling Stone and Strand. Together they negotiate shipping, packaging, and 3PL fulfillment for 8- and 9-figure brands. Seeing inside dozens of operations at once sharpens the answers: the four words founders keep falling for, the packaging line worth a tenth of a company's profit, and the RFP everyone runs and almost nobody runs well.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Reading the setup
When you walk into a new client, what's the first thing you look at, and what ops gap does it usually expose?
Xun: The first thing I'm looking for is opportunity. Every brand is a little different, but I'm reading for the telltale signs of whether they've got the right setup for what they're trying to do, not just today, but over the next couple of years.
So when a client comes to us for, say, a 3PL, we start with fundamentals: what's driving the business today? What channels are you in? How many SKUs? What does production look like? Those answers drive everything, what kind of partner you need, what location they should be in, what capabilities you need to sustain your growth.
And the mistake I find almost every time is that the setup exists for legacy reasons. A brand doing $50 million is still sitting in the same warehouse they used at $5 million, in a city they picked because that's where the founder happened to live.
They've outgrown their partner and don't fully realize it. So what I'm really trying to understand is how the setup came to be, and then whether there's actually a propensity to change.
What's an ops vendor pitch that sounds great in the room but you've learned to be skeptical of?
Xun: This one's in relation to 3PLs. The one founders fall for is "yes, we do Target." Or Walmart, or whatever big retailer they're chasing. And it's almost meaningless, because there's a massive gap hiding inside that sentence.
"Yes, we do Target" can mean "we did three Target orders last year." Or it can mean "20% of our brands ship to Target and we've been at it for twelve years." Same four words. Completely different partner.
Because retail readiness isn't just knowing what to do, it's having documented how you do it. When the chargebacks come, and with big retailers they inevitably come, you need the documentation to fight them. That takes years to build. A 3PL that's been doing Target for a decade has that muscle; one that's done a handful of orders is going to learn it on your account, at your expense.
And here's the irony: the 3PLs that are truly great at this are often the worst at selling it. The ones who can't really do it sell it beautifully. So the brand hears a confident pitch and can't validate a word of it, no prior relationship, no way to know if it's true or just sales moving them down the funnel. That's exactly where we come in. We've worked with these partners for years, so we already know who actually does what they say.
Hire or partner
When a client is deciding between hiring an ops person or leaning on a partner, what do you tell them, and how has AI shifted that advice in the last year?
Xun: If the work is judgment-heavy and recurring, hire; if it's execution-heavy and seasonal, partner. What's changed is that a lot of the work that used to justify an early ops hire, such as chasing invoice discrepancies, checking SLA compliance, matching POs to what actually shipped, is now handled by tooling sitting on top of the vendor relationship.
Think of AI as the glue: it does the analysis, it processes the POs, and by doing that it frees up a human's time to do the things AI can't, like build relationships, do the in-person visits, run the QBRs, think strategically.
So brands can stay leaner longer and lean harder on partners. But the negotiation, and the judgment call on when a vendor is drifting from what you agreed to, that still needs a person. I'd argue that's actually a higher-leverage hire now because they're not buried in reconciliation busywork anymore.
A dozen hard jobs running in parallel
Yan, you scaled Warby Parker and Weee!. What does scaling a consumer brand look like today that people outside the industry completely underestimate?
Yan: Building a brand is hard, and this is where I have a lot of respect for founders. One person is responsible for the whole company at once. You have to grow it, understand your market and your customers, and understand a little of everything: how performance marketing works, which channels are right for you, whether that's TikTok, how early to go into retail, how to show up at Target and actually sell your brand and your story. And then you have to hire a whole team, figure out whether they really know what they're doing, ask the right questions, and then have the discipline to let them run.
What people outside the industry underestimate is the sheer breadth of that. It's not one hard job, it's a dozen hard jobs running in parallel, and supply chain and operations is just one plate of many, usually the one that gets the least attention because it's not the fun, visible part.
That's exactly why we exist: we go deep on the one area we know extremely well so a founder doesn't have to become an expert in it too. Honestly, the hardest part of our work isn't the supply chain. It's finding the right brands who see it the same way and want to take that journey with us.
You've bet your whole business on ops as a competitive advantage. Why do most founders still treat it as a cost center, and what does it take to change their mind?
Yan: I'll build on what I just said. The hardest part of our job isn't the supply chain, it's convincing the brand leaders and key decision makers. And I don't really blame them. They've got a lot on their plate, and it's not easy to step back and listen to someone tell you how your own business should be run. There's also so much noise out there, so many partners, so many consultants. How do you know who to trust? That's why we get the best reception when we come through a recommendation, when a fellow founder or operator says "you should talk to these guys, they did a great job for us." That's the highest praise there is.
The other piece is founders feel like they can just do it themselves in-house. A couple of years ago, early on with Operating Crew, I was introduced to an apparel brand. I ran the full analysis and told them they'd likely save two to three million dollars a year. The founder decided to do it themselves. Three years later they're still in the same location, and they've probably left seven to ten million on the table by now. I can only make the case so many times that it's truly low-hanging fruit.
One line item, a tenth of the profit
What's the single biggest line item brands overpay on without realizing: packaging, shipping, or fulfillment?
Yan: Honestly it's hard to name one single line item, because we don't look at it that way. Packaging, shipping, fulfillment, to us that's all one thing: fulfillment cost. And what I can tell you is there's almost always low-hanging fruit in there, no matter the size, even brands doing hundreds of millions in revenue.
I'll give you a real one. We looked at a brand, a public company doing about $400 million in revenue, and found $300,000 to $400,000 a year in savings on packaging.
Against a company that size, that sounds like a rounding error. But here's what we only learned later: their entire operating profit for the year was only a few million dollars.
That one packaging line was worth roughly 10% of their operating income. One line item, a tenth of everything the business earned.
They decided not to make any changes. And 2025 turned out to be a hard year for them: margins got squeezed, demand softened, and they swung to a loss.
That's the pattern I see constantly. It's not that operators can't do this, it's that they have a hundred real priorities that only they can own. Making sure inventory lands. Making sure the 3PL gets the order to Walmart on time. Making sure the right ingredients are in the door for the production run. Those are the things internal operators do best, and that's where their time should go.
Think of us like surgeons. Every time we meet a brand, we're seeing them in the OR. We're doing an operation a day. That's not what most people do. A brand's operator could do it, but usually they don't have the capacity, or, more often, they don't have the relationships and the depth of experience. That's the whole job for us; we run dozens of RFPs a month. I use the plumber line a lot: you don't ask a plumber if he can replace your faucet, that's literally his job. Lowering fulfillment cost is ours.
Against the big RFP
Give us a piece of DTC ops orthodoxy you think is wrong.
Yan: Here's one that might be contentious: I don't believe in the big RFP. The 15-3PL RFP, the consultant-run process. I'm not saying it's wrong exactly, I just think it's almost never run well.
We're the opposite, extremely selective. We don't work with a ton of 3PLs. When we come into a process it's a huge amount of time: understanding the business, the products, the order distribution, the operational PTSD from wherever they are today, what they need now and in three years, which retailers they're going to, how you'd actually pick those orders in the warehouse down to the seconds, what capabilities are true value-adds. Run properly, that's over 100 hours for a few 3PLs.
So do the math. Fifteen 3PLs at that depth is 250-plus hours. No consultant and no in-house operator has that. So what actually happens is they send a seven-page PDF with no order history and expect fifteen 3PLs to price it. That's shopping on price with no context. And it fails two ways: the honest 3PL prices in a huge buffer because they don't know how bad it'll be, or the aggressive one gives you a beautiful number, gets you to sign, then jacks up the price once they realize it's harder than it looked. And now you're stuck.
The last piece: the best 3PLs decline these. This happened recently with a nine-figure brand. Seven-page PDF, no order histories, wanting pricing without even a call. A great 3PL sees they're one of ten and instantly walks.
So the process actively filters out the partners you actually want.
The million dollars that started it
Why build an advisory serving many brands instead of taking another big operator seat?
Yan: This is a fun one. I'll be honest, sometimes I miss being at a brand: the fun of optimizing, building teams, working with great people at a company that's scaling and doing well. I've done that a few times and it's a blast. But inside a brand there's always a lot that's outside your control no matter what.
Building our own platform means we get to work with founders who align with how we think. Not just about operations, but about brand, about the commercial side, retail, customer experience. And this comes back to our founding story. In 2023 I was working with an eyewear brand, not Warby, and they came to me and said, "Can you help us get profitable? VCs like our business but they won't fund us because we're not profitable." I came in across pretty much the same areas we work on today, and we saved them a million dollars over the next twelve months. This was a ten-million-dollar revenue company with negative margins, and we did it in about three months. And they turned around and said, "You know what, we're not raising anymore."
That's when it hit me. We had just put a million dollars of pure cash back in the bank. Not VC money, real cash. Think about the math: at a 1% net margin, you'd need a hundred million dollars in revenue to put a million in the bank, and that's pre-tax. We did it at ten-million-dollar scale. And I thought, imagine doing this for dozens, or hundreds, of brands.
I knew I wanted to focus on the area we know best rather than being the person who does whatever a brand needs. I've made enough mistakes across five startups now. I probably could do the generalist thing, but that's not our competitive advantage, and it's not where we add the most value in the least amount of time. That's how we landed on the model we have today: we're not supply chain consultants because we want to go beyond the hourly ticker. We dive in to help brands build the right infrastructure to scale profitably and be the best brand they can be, so the founder can focus on the things they're great at. I don't think I could have that kind of impact from any single operator seat. Definitely not.
The view across dozens of brands
Interviewing Yan and Xun together, you hear the division of labor in real time: Yan reaches for the operational problem, Xun reads whether the brand will actually change. Their last two answers arrived almost as one.
You see inside dozens of brands at once. What do the top 10% do operationally that the rest don't?
Yan: A few things. The first I've already touched on: they treat their operational partners like true partners, not transactional ones. That alone separates a lot of them.
But the bigger one is how they make decisions. The best operators test constantly. They think in terms of one-way versus two-way doors. If a decision is irreversible, a one-way door, they're appropriately cautious. But if it's a two-way door, they just run the test. They're not afraid of change. And that matters enormously when you're scaling, because your business is a different company every six months; it faces different challenges at every stage. If you just hold on to what you've already built, you're going to run into problems. That's especially true for the brands scaling quickly. A billion-dollar company, sure, things probably don't change that much year to year.
A fast-growing brand can't operate like the version of itself from two years ago.
And the last one is simple: the top 10% trust the best people. Whether that's on their own team or someone outside it. They know they can't be the expert in everything, so they find people who are and they let them run.
What do you disagree about most when advising a client?
Xun: Honestly, once we're actually advising a client, we don't disagree much. That's the part we're good at. The real tension is upstream of that, and it's internal: whether a brand is the right fit for us, and whether we're the right fit for them. It comes right back to the point about convincing a founder or the key operators and reading whether they'll truly commit to a change.
Yan: Xun has a really good sense for this, for whether a brand and their team are aligned, whether there's real conviction to make a change. And I'll admit, I sometimes just love diving straight into solving the operational problem. But she's often right, and it means a lot here, because if there's no will, there's no way. It doesn't matter if we have the best solution in the world for them. So the disagreement isn't really with the client. It's the healthy one between me and Xun about which brands are the right ones to take on.