Chiang Mai to Seoul. A half-day layover. Seoul to Las Vegas. About 35 hours after leaving his home in Thailand, Robert Sukrachand finally arrived at a casino hotel off the strip, a place where local retirees play slots at 5 a.m. He was on a mission: to recover tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of lighting from a warehouse he had never been to.
Sukrachand—the owner of Pern Baan, an up-and-coming design brand—was not the only one looking to get into the Las Vegas warehouse. The location belonged to a logistics company, HVN, that counted several other buzzy studios as clients, including In Common With, Tortuga and Sophie Lou Jacobsen. In early March, HVN had sent many of its customers a troubling note, kicking off a scramble to get to Nevada and find out what was going on with their inventory.
Only, the word inventory does not really capture the seriousness of the issue. For a young company, a snag in the logistics chain can jeopardize big orders, lose them customers, kill cash flow, and—in the extreme—tank their business. It’s the kind of problem worth flying 8,000 miles to solve. “When I first told them I was going to take this trip, I had some friends be like, ‘Why are you doing this? You’re overreacting,’” recalls Sukrachand. “But I couldn’t risk it.”
People like to say that when you peel back the curtain on the design industry, there’s nothing glamorous about it at all. Surely, they’re talking about warehousing, logistics and fulfillment—the gritty business of storing stuff, packing it onto a truck, getting it into another warehouse, onto another truck, and finally into a client’s home undamaged, so it can be zhuzhed into place and photographed for Elle Decor.
Because most brands in the industry do not have sufficient scale to entirely run their own operations, they often turn to what’s called a third-party logistics provider, commonly shortened to 3PL. In the best of times, a 3PL will receive your product, store it properly, pack it securely, and get it on the back of a truck, all for a reasonable fee.
These providers often represent a tricky stepping stone in a brand’s journey. Very early on, most companies pack their product and ship it to customers themselves, or, like Sukrachand, rely on a small network for help. But once they reach a certain volume, a 3PL becomes a necessity, unless the founder wants to spend all their time stuffing Bubble Wrap into a box and driving to FedEx.
The challenge for many brands is that their product tends to be the exact opposite of what 3PL companies are optimized around. Design products are fragile and require special handling. Design products come in complicated, endlessly varied SKUs. Design products are expensive and don’t move quickly. By contrast, 3PL providers tend to specialize in shipping hundreds of the same thing every day—the simpler and sturdier the better.
“Our best-selling product is a lamp with a marble slab,” says Sukrachand. “We used to get a lot of returns when we would just ship any slab that was a pink marble. So now we actually let the customer choose the exact slab. If we sell 200 of those in a year, that’s 200 unique SKUs. And so for the 3PL, the idea of having to go and find that one slab, it’s not appealing. … In the beginning, I told companies, ‘I’d be willing to pay 10 times the normal pick-and-pack fee if you just do this.’ They just weren’t interested.”
That dynamic is what makes a willing 3PL provider something of a unicorn for design brands of a certain size. For many, that unicorn was Mvnifest.
Mvnifest (pronounced “manifest”) had a good reputation, at least partially because it was founded by entrepreneurs—Brian and Samantha Rose, the husband-and-wife team behind kitchen utensils brand GIR—who had been on the other side of the equation. “We got into the fulfillment business because my 3PL was doing a terrible job, and I showed up with a truck and said, ‘Put my stuff in the back,’” recalls Brian.
Early on, Mvnifest mostly worked for a small network of the Roses’ friends and acquaintances, including Food52. After selling GIR in 2021, they started to focus more on the logistics business, taking on more clients. That’s when they began working with Andrea Hill, the founder of Brooklyn-based design brand Tortuga Forma. “It felt like a small design community,” she says. “Whatever issues we had, we had a direct point of contact, so things would get solved quickly.” Mvnifest’s warehouse was located in Pennsylvania; Hill would visit occasionally and was happy with what she saw. Yes, the service was on the expensive side. But then, she says with a laugh, “if you’re really happy with your 3PL, you’re probably paying a little too much.”
Then in the summer of 2025, things began to change. Mvnifest told its customers that it was working with a new partner, a logistics company called HVN, and that it would be moving all of its inventory in Pennsylvania to a Las Vegas location.
The change was confusing to some customers, and the cross-country move created a handful of problems, but most went along for the ride. Behind the scenes, the Roses had sold the brick-and-mortar 3PL operation to an entrepreneur, Kensen Wah, while they pivoted to focusing on enterprise resource planning software. HVN (pronounced “Haven”) was Wah’s new name for the business.
“We realize with the fulfillment business, if we wanted to grow that we’d have to keep opening new buildings and [signing] more leases and taking on more square footage,” says Brian. “But the secret sauce was taking the knowledge that we had gained and turning it into something any brand can use, not just the brands we do fulfillment for.”
The Roses had first connected with Wah at a conference. He had a background in logistics—his LinkedIn page lists a year spent as chief revenue officer for a Canadian fulfillment company, Stallion Express—and experience with e-commerce too, as the co-founder of a popular DTC conference, Ecom North. The Roses hoped that Wah would bring Canadian customers to the business, especially as a slew of companies were newly eager to set up a parallel fulfillment operation in the States to avoid tariffs.
It’s not clear whether Wah was able to snag Canadian clients for HVN’s operation in Las Vegas. However, the company’s existing customers began to notice changes in the fall of 2025, shortly after he took over the business. There were additional charges added to their invoices without much explanation, and it took longer to get emails returned.
The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas—peak shopping season—brought new frustrations. “Things started to break down a little,” says Hill. “I told them, ‘Look, the performance this season was terrible. What’s going on?’ [HVN] explained that there were some layoffs right before peak, and so they were understaffed. “I started reaching out to try and find a new 3PL, and no one would work with me because I ship less than 1,000 orders per month.”
Sukrachand had similar issues. “I had a 12-day period right after Black Friday where they didn't ship any orders,” he says. “I was emailing, ‘Why are my orders not shipping?’ It was just like: ‘This is what you guys do. What is going on here?’”
The situation changed abruptly again in early March, when HVN sent a note to several customers, including Hill and Sukrachand, that it was discontinuing their service “due to an unexpected system shutdown impacting our fulfillment platform, combined with a strategic operational realignment of our service model.” The cutoff was effective immediately.
For Sukrachand, the timing couldn’t have been worse, as HVN had not shipped any orders for several days prior, and Pern Baan was staring down a serious deadline. “I had been freaking out, because we had our biggest order of the year so far, almost 60 lamps for one hotel,” he says. “I had just shipped the stock from Thailand to the 3PL. It had a very specific lead time and it represented such a large amount of revenue that we couldn’t have that not ship.”
At the end of his 35-hour journey, Sukrachand was able to get into HVN’s warehouse in Las Vegas. He hadn’t known what to expect, and feared the worst. (“I was worried I would show up to an exploded building or something,” he says.) In the end, while the warehouse was disorganized and the management software was shut off, Sukrachand was able to locate all his inventory, pack it up, and ship it to Brooklyn. He left town and spent a few days hiking in Zion National Park to clear his head.
The timing was also rough for Hill, who says that several of her drop-ship accounts had suspended her as a vendor because HVN hadn’t shipped orders. After an exhaustive search, she found a 3PL in Long Beach, California, that would take on Tortuga as a client, and hired a local Las Vegas moving company to get her out of HVN’s warehouse.
The Roses headed to Las Vegas the week of March 23 to help pack up other clients who were leaving HVN’s facility. “A bunch of people needed help getting their product out, and I thought, ‘This feels like a melting ice cube, and people are going to show up and the building is going to be padlocked or something,’” says Brian. “Then on Friday, [Wah] emailed clients saying, ‘We’re shutting down, If you want your stuff, call Brian.”
Wah declined an interview request for this story. It’s not clear what happened behind the scenes at HVN over the eight months between his acquisition and the apparent closure of the Las Vegas warehouse. However, for the customers who were caught up in the situation, the challenges were vivid.
Sophie Lou Jacobsen, whose eponymous glassware brand was a client of Mvnifest and then HVN, points out that while her inventory is now out of Vegas, the effects of the drama are still working their way through the business. “This was essentially one month of not being able to ship, meaning not being able to collect payments,” she says. “We will be able to make those shipments, but it bruises relationships. … And even if it has no effect on profit, it puts a huge strain on cash flow for the month. There are a lot of hurdles to overcome because of this situation.”
In her case, there was a happy fallback option. Prior to signing up with Mvnifest, she had relied on a New York–based nonprofit called Mid-Hudson Works for warehousing and fulfillment. In the midst of the drama, Mid-Hudson Works had reached out saying they had recently received an old return. Jacobsen took it as a sign. “They’re really excited about having us back, so we’re going there,” she says. “It never really felt good from the start when we moved. I think maybe there’s a general lesson there about trusting your instinct and your gut and sticking to your intentions.”
For Brian Rose, who spoke to BOH from the HVN warehouse, the entire story is personal—an echo of his own bad 3PL experience that led to the founding of Mvnifest. “Every dollar I ever made in my entire life went into brown cardboard boxes on shelves in somebody’s warehouse,” he says. “And to me, the accounts were all wrong, and info was scattered. It was a mess. And they didn’t look at it the way I looked at it. For me, it was: ‘You have my life savings, and it is in disarray.’ So when I walk into a warehouse, I see it like: That's somebody’s college fund for their kids, and if it’s in disarray, the disrespect that you’re showing to that person’s life savings is anathema to me.”
