Batch LDN's Pim Vellenga on made-to-order fashion and the fulfilment trade-off

Chain Reaction episode 41 features Pim Vellenga, Head of Operations at Batch LDN, a brand built on the made-to-order model. For logistics professionals, that framing matters immediately: when a business produces only what customers have already bought, every assumption about inventory buffers, warehouse capacity and fulfilment timelines has to be rebuilt from the ground up. The conversation covers the operational realities that made-to-order creates and demands. Vellenga walks through how keeping inventory low changes the relationship between demand signals and production scheduling, why batching orders before manufacturing is a deliberate throughput decision rather than a workaround, and what local production actually means for supplier risk when lead times cannot be hidden behind a warehouse full of safety stock. These are not abstract sustainability talking points. They are operational choices with direct consequences for who fulfils an order, when and at what cost. Fulfilment and customer communication take up a significant part of the discussion. Replacing speed with control and quality requires a customer who understands what they are buying into. Vellenga is direct about why that communication cannot be an afterthought: when the production-to-dispatch window is longer by design, the customer relationship has to carry more weight than it does in a standard stock-and-ship model. For anyone running fulfilment operations for brands moving in this direction, the episode is a practical account of what changes at each stage of the process, not a pitch for the model. For listeners working in logistics, warehousing or supply chain planning, the episode raises questions worth sitting with. What does a client base shifting toward made-to-order mean for warehouse throughput planning? How does a 3PL or fulfilment provider price and schedule for batched, non-continuous demand? And when the commercial case for lower waste depends on operational discipline across the whole chain, where does the coordination burden actually land? Vellenga does not answer those questions from a platform or provider perspective, but the operational detail he provides gives logistics professionals a clear enough picture to work from. Episode 41 of Chain Reaction is available now on YouTube at https://youtu.be/fRSWlV-3khI, on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/episode/05hB8UBCV0AAEsUhGl0OCr?si=oMsXbSr3RXeJ-3_NCCiQXA, and on Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-41-fashion-has-a-waste-problem-batch-ldn-doesnt/id1816207986?i=1000765421636.