Thirty years in the three-tier system, and the question I still ask every brand

I have been on the distributor side of that call more times than I can count, most recently as Director of Sales at AMN Distributors, where I led national sales growth, distributor management, national account development, and market expansion across multiple states. Last month, I joined Aldenbridge Logistics Solutions as Business Development Manager, because I have spent enough of my career watching good brands lose shelf space to a handoff nobody owned, and I want to be the one who owns it instead.

That AMN role capped more than 30 years in the beverage alcohol industry, working every side of the three-tier system (the U.S. structure that requires alcohol to move from supplier to distributor to retailer): suppliers, importers, distributors, retailers, and national chain accounts, with multi-million-dollar portfolios and a lot of wine, spirits, and emerging brands trying to scale.

What those 30 years actually taught me

The brands that struggle are rarely the ones with a bad product or a weak distributor relationship. They are the ones with too many handoffs and nobody who owns the seams between them.

A typical imported wine or spirits brand runs four separate vendors between the port and the shelf: a customs broker, a freight forwarder, a warehouse, and a final-mile carrier. Each one does its own job correctly. The failures live in the gaps. The entry clears on a Friday and nobody books a truck until Tuesday. Pallets sit at a cross-dock because the warehouse was never told a load was coming. A reset window closes while everyone waits on somebody else’s paperwork.

When that happens, your distributor does not call your customs broker. They call you.

Three questions worth asking before your next season

1. Count your vendors between port and shelf. If the number is three or more, write down who owns each handoff by name. Any handoff without an owner is your exposure.
2. Ask how long your product sits before you decide to sell it, and whether you are paying duty before that decision is even made. Bonded and FTZ (Foreign Trade Zone) storage lets you defer duty until the product actually leaves the warehouse for the U.S. market, not from the day it landed in the country. If the honest answer is “a while,” that is capital sitting in a warehouse that did not need to leave your pocket yet.
3. Check whether anyone can see the whole chain. If answering “where is my product” takes three phone calls, you do not have visibility. You have a phone list.

Why I joined Aldenbridge

Aldenbridge runs customs brokerage, freight forwarding, and warehousing (which can handle last-mile delivery in California and Florida) under one roof, which makes those handoffs internal instead of contractual. Customs clearance, ocean and domestic freight, and bonded, FTZ, tax-paid, and temperature-controlled storage in California and Florida all sit with one partner. As a beverage 3PL (third-party logistics provider), that is the difference between four vendors pointing at each other and one team accountable for the full route. You can see all three branches at aldenbridge.com.

My thanks to the Aldenbridge leadership team for the welcome.

Let’s talk

Here is where I come in. If you are a supplier, importer, distributor, or retailer and you are not sure which of those three services you actually need, that is my problem to solve, not yours. Email me your current setup (who handles what between the port and the shelf) at eklebanow@aldenbridge.com and I will tell you where I see the gaps, whether or not Aldenbridge turns out to be the answer.