Lesson Learned: Focus on Your Strengths

“Outsourcing allows us to do what we do best: sales, marketing and product development,” says Michael Sutton, president of FrenchToast.com, which is the direct marketing arm of Lollytogs, a company that has been making school uniforms since 1958.

French Toast, the catalog division, was established in 1999, and for about a year, Sutton and his staff tried to do all of the fulfillment tasks in-house. “That was until we realized it took too much time—from a systems aspect—to focus on order-management and other customer-service issues. I decided that if we were going to grow as a company, we’d have to focus primarily on the product development, sales and marketing aspects of the business,” he says. “We needed to find a partner with the expertise and the systems in place to run the day-to-day operations for us.”