How Highlight uses turn-key logistics to enable faster speed to insight

A version of this article was originally posted on Emma Steele's LinkedIn.

One of the biggest pain points we hear from product builders in the CPG world over and over again is the struggle that is product shipment.

Successful in-home usage testing (IHUT) requires so many disparate pieces. You need a teammate, partner, or tool with consumer and sensory testing expertise to craft high-quality surveys and ask the right questions. You need the data insights "nerdery" to analyze those insights and put them to work. You need inspired thinking, lived experience, and industry know-how to come up with a great idea for a product in the first place.

And on top of all of that, you’re also supposed to be a logistics whiz? No, thanks!

Logistics is particularly painful for teams trying to run quality IHUTs for a number of reasons:

• It’s manual. Preparing 100 units of product for shipment means placing 100 units in individual boxes, packaging them to arrive in one piece, and printing 100 individual shipping labels. Multiply the difficulty by a factor of 10 or 100 if you have to blind those units for unbiased testing, or ensure a seamless cold chain for products that must be refrigerated or frozen.
• It’s expensive. Whatever provider you’re using, shipping costs add up quickly. Costs can soar when things (inevitably) go wrong, like undelivered or missed deliveries, cold chain failures, or just a crushed box that was supposed to contain a sample of your crispy new potato chips.
• It’s slow. When you have to manage all this yourself as a non-expert in logistics, it’s all going to take some time, from packaging everything up properly to tapping your foot waiting for the deliveries to arrive at your testers’ homes–and then waiting again for them to actually try the product and submit their feedback.
• It’s error-prone. Whenever you’re attempting a task outside of your usual day-to-day responsibilities or professional wheelhouse, mistakes are more likely to happen.

Obviously, managing your own logistics for IHUT in-house is not an ideal situation. But at Highlight, we also frequently hear about IHUT logistics challenges teams have faced with other service providers. They face all the same aforementioned challenges of slowness and high costs, plus issues like the “black box” of no communication for weeks, or even months, while their products are processed for shipment, or crossed wires about how many units need shipping, and exactly how they should be packaged.

Unfortunately, when it comes to IHUT logistics, communications breakdown, confusion, and slowness seem to be more the norm than not.

Highlight addresses the logistics challenge head-on

The birth of Highlight's IHUT logistics solution is a part of a common theme around our founding story.

Our founder and CEO, Dana Kim, worked as an in-field researcher herself, helping product-building teams at consumer brands like The Coca-Cola Company, Nike, Starbucks, and more. But being the rigorous and diligent researcher she is, she was dissatisfied with the current industry conventions. So many obstacles prevented companies from obtaining high-quality insights that would actually move the needle for their product success.

They say necessity is the mother of invention–which often rings true. Sometimes, though, the best inventors and founders are usually just fed up with the norm.

That’s why Dana started Highlight, to take all of these pain points she herself had experienced firsthand and put an end to them with a system that actually works.

Highlight’s unique solution to IHUT logistics

In a nutshell, Highlight’s IHUT logistics include:

• Standard, express, and overnight shipping in sustainable packaging, including refrigerated and frozen
• Relabeling and blinding of products
• Re-packing of products in FDA-certified facilities (i.e., a clean room)
• Randomization of products and cell-balancing
• Automated kitting: Your kit is exported directly from the Highlight platform to ensure consistency with your project setup
• Built-in quality controls
• Speedy turnaround times from receiving product to shipping to testers - as fast as a week from warehouse product receipt to delivery at testers’ homes

Highlight makes that all possible because our operations team partners closely with a dedicated warehouse that ensures our logistics for IHUT are seamless. Our team and platform are integrated–meaning when you set up your research in the Highlight platform, the next steps are automated to communicate with our logistics team with your handling instructions and shipment information. We use this in-platform channel as an open line of communication to keep tabs on where your samples are in the process of shipping, preparation, and distribution to testers.

Highlight’s Director of Operations and Customer Enablement, Stefanie Buffa, and Manager of Logistics & Warehousing, Kyle Kretkowski, are fully embedded in the day-to-day logistics operations of every IHUT project Highlight customers run. But beyond that, they’re constantly monitoring the metrics to ensure that Highlight’s IHUT logistics continue to lead the industry on quality and reliability.

For reference:

• In 2025, Highlight customers completed hundreds of IHUT projects
• That meant over tens of thousands of boxes shipped!
• And in all that work, we clocked only a 0.4% rate of cold chain box errors–way, way below warehousing industry standards (but also a number Stefanie, Kyle, and the team are committed to decreasing even further in 2026!)
  
  

2 customer examples: What “good IHUT logistics” looks like at Highlight

Hanes values Highlight’s flexibility

We’ve talked about speed, cost effectiveness, and transparent communication, but one underrated quality in a great logistics partner for IHUTs is flexibility. This is a piece of feedback we hear again and again from Highlight customers.

One such example is the Consumer Insights team at Hanesbrands Inc.. They told us they’re a team that moves fast. “We want to move yesterday,” were the exact words they used. But that hadn’t always been possible with other logistics partners.

“Previous vendors felt clunky,” they told us. “It took forever, and we heard a lot of ‘we can’t package it for you,’ or ‘we can’t do that.’”

The biggest problem boiled down to this: “They weren’t very flexible.” And if you’re not flexible, you can’t move quickly while ensuring quality.

Highlight works so well thanks to the integrated nature of our operations team and platform. We have the right people and the right tools in the right places at all times, so when and if there are questions or details that are unclear, we’re able to clear those up pronto and keep things moving - quickly and with quality.

A new skincare customer values our blinding

Ahead of Aeston West’s launch of premium, effective skincare for mature skin, they used the Highlight platform to verify consumer perception of their product and establish claims to use in their marketing.

A key component to verifying efficacy and getting the claims needed for a successful go-to-market launch is creating unbiased testing conditions. In other words–does the product really do what it claims to do, or do consumers just think the bottle is really pretty?

So, Highlight’s logistics team took away all the bells and whistles, stripping Aeston West’s product of all its gorgeous packaging so that users could test whether the products really worked.

Check out Aeston West’s website to see how beautiful their regular packaging is.

In the end, the team verified the claims they could use to show unbiased, third-party proof of their product’s efficacy. And they didn’t have to spend a moment worrying about logistics. “It was really smooth to send product in,” they told us. “I felt like it was all managed really well.”

Want to learn more about how Highlight manages IHUT logistics?

Begin with these resources to read up on what logistics & shipping at Highlight looks like:

• Highlight's turn-key logistics overview

• Highlight product shipping & handling FAQs
  

Or schedule a call to ask your specific questions to a member of our team.

Don’t let your IHUT logistics headaches continue to plague you. We know there’s a better way to do IHUT–because we built it!