About a year ago, Chad Graci found himself reflecting on nearly 20 years in the design industry while discussing the biggest pain points in his career with business and life partner Collin Magee. One area stuck out like a sore thumb.

“I said, ‘What is the number one stressor for me in my day-to-day business life?’ and it was truly the storage, receiving and care of precious items on behalf of my clients,” says the New Orleans–based principal of Graci Interiors. “It kept me up at night. It was a struggle to get information. It was a struggle to get damage reports. They were damaging things constantly—just not understanding how to handle one-of-a-kind, unique fine pieces.”

Graci is not alone in his angst. Shipping and receiving has never exactly been seamless, but over the past year in particular, circumstances have worsened. Items are coming in damaged or getting lost in transit. Delays are increasingly the norm. Costs are climbing higher alongside the rising price of fuel—not to mention the added impact of tariffs. But try voicing any of those concerns with a shipping partner, and you’re likely to hit a wall with a dead-end customer service inbox or an AI agent.

Fed up with feeling powerless, some designers are taking matters into their own hands—including Graci and Magee. Last year, they launched Crescent City Receiving and Logistics, their own white-glove service catering specifically to the interior design industry. The company has already accrued nearly 30 additional designer clients seeking an alternative to existing receiving operations—and an escape from today’s shipping headaches.

Graci and Magee aren’t the only designers staking their claim on a small part of the snarled global supply chain. A growing contingent of design industry insiders are establishing their own receiving firms in hopes of insulating their projects—and ultimately their clients—from delays, damages and higher costs. So far, their businesses are all the better for it.

Before the spike in shipping issues over the past year—and even prior to the supply chain challenges that derailed the design industry during the pandemic—Cortney Bishop could tell that delays and damages were hurting her firm’s bottom line. More than half of the time, contractors would reschedule, pushing the Charleston designer to reschedule her receivers, who weren’t always available for the makeup date—a domino effect that quickly derailed project timelines. To make matters worse, constant rescheduling led to wariness from her shipping partners, which only made it more difficult to lock in future delivery dates.

Eight years ago, she started the receiving arm of her business—Cortney Bishop Design Transport—alongside her husband and business partner, Baker Bishop. Operating their own warehouse has offered her firm greater flexibility when it comes to receiving shipments, storing items and scheduling installs. Plus, products can be unboxed immediately upon arrival and inspected thoroughly to ensure any damages are identified as soon as possible.

But if the shipping landscape was difficult when Bishop launched, it has only become more challenging to navigate in recent years—thanks in part, she says, to a noticeable uptick in damages. She suspects part of the problem stems from the surge in demand for design services during the pandemic. As orders for design products ballooned, the industries that support the design sector, including shipping partners, never quite caught up.

“With that boom, unfortunately, [came] some quality issues,” she says. “What’s been happening with design in general is that everything’s more custom. Everything’s more complicated. There are so many designers, and there’s so much demand, but there are not enough servicemen, subcontractors, or delivery and install people with quality experience.”

While occasional damages are bound to happen on the lengthy journey furnishings undertake from vendor to designer, a key complication often arises when a receiving operation fails to notice or communicate when a piece has been compromised. By the time the designer is able to inspect the item themselves—or, in the worst-case scenario, when the product arrives at install—and is discovered damaged, it can majorly delay a project. Even worse, it may force the designer to eat the costs to repair or replace the piece if the return window has already elapsed.

That sequence of events happened one too many times to designer Blair Moore of Moore House Design. The final straw came amid an Upper West Side project, for which she ordered two matching chairs. Her receiver sent along a photo of just one of the items, and nothing seemed amiss. On install day, however, unpacking the other chair revealed a disaster: In Moore’s words, it was “discolored, ill-proportioned—not the exact same chair.”

The designer had reached her breaking point after years of similar mishaps. “Every time I got to an install, something was broken, something was discolored, they didn’t take photos of all of the pieces that were delivered in an order,” she says. “And I was like, ‘I’m spending so much money with these people, my clients are spending so much money with these people—how can we get this wrong?’”

During the pandemic, Moore moved from New York to Rhode Island, where she soon leased a 10,000-square-foot former mill. Today, the space serves as the warehouse headquarters of her receiving business—and with her own logistics team, she set out to do things differently.

“Once [an] item is received, our team unpacks and unwraps it, puts it together, makes sure nothing is missing,” she says. “There’s nothing worse than getting a vintage Murano chandelier, and having the receiving warehouse not understand how to put that Murano chandelier together, and not know how that’s supposed to look, [so] they then miss three pieces that the factory forgot to send, and then we’re at install without three pieces of a Murano glass chandelier.”

When launching her own operation, Bishop also wanted to find solutions for issues that her previous receivers—who didn’t specialize in the design industry—simply couldn’t solve. “What happens when you need a sofa reupholstered? What happens when you have a light that needs wiring from France? What happens when you need a piece of art dropped off at the framer?” she says. “All of those costs can get so exorbitant if you’re calling a different company and they’re doing onesies here and there.”

With CBD Transport, those types of tasks are built into the firm’s regular operations: The Bishops work closely with her firm’s lead designers to plan trips to the necessary repair and reupholstering providers (or whatever other service a piece might need), which are grouped around multiple items from each project to make for less trips—and lower costs. The price of these services, meanwhile, is billed to clients as an 18 percent flat fee on every line item.

Within the past year, they have expanded the operation with the launch of a logistics company, which handles domestic ground shipments through a fleet of trucks, allowing for faster transit times and priority delivery. For the designer, perhaps the best advantage of the new addition is having oversight over another leg of the shipping journey. To that end, she’s been specifically recruiting drivers who have worked in the design industry, based on recommendations from vintage dealers from within her network. (“If you’re trusting somebody, trust the vendors who have been in business a long time,” she says.)

When it came to structuring Crescent City Receiving and Logistics, Graci and Magee also looked to incorporate designer-specific features that best fit the working practices of its clientele. One of the pair’s first hires was a software engineer, who helped custom-build an inventory management system and client portal to improve designers’ ability to track their shipments. And for many designer-clients, the biggest benefit of working with CCRL is having a safe, reliable and accessible holding location—a capability that was born directly out of Graci’s own design needs.

“A client can have a set of dining chairs delivered one day. They can meet with their upholsterer or their client there to inspect the chairs further than what we’ve done—look at fabrics, get quotes from their upholsterer—and then their upholsterer can either take them from our facility or we can store them for a longer lead time,” says Graci. “That is something that I need as a designer—flexibility in access to my items and the ability to retrieve my items in a certain amount of time.”

Running their own receiving operation has given these designers greater control over their orders—and often a higher spot on their shipping partners’ list of priorities. Even so, it can’t protect against every outcome. When it comes to poor service—spotty communication, long response times, or multiple items arriving damaged—Moore has simply resorted to blacklisting certain shipping partners to reduce the risk of future complications.

“Those issues are why we have this list, and why we are very particular about the people we work with,” she says. “[Receiving goods late or damaged] hurts our bottom line, and that bottom line ends up hurting our customer—and our reputation.”

Opening a warehouse won’t be realistic for everyone. But the lessons from designers who have waded into the receiving business themselves can help others ask the right questions and find the best partners. Notably, Moore recommends focusing on finding the most reliable receiver—a company with the best marks for communication and documentation—which she’s quick to note is unlikely to be the most cost-effective option, or the nearest. “Never go with your cheapest option for receiving. That’s a bad idea,” she says. “Find a receiving company that is good, not just close.”

Once the relationship begins, she recommends “micro-analyzing” the receiving partners’ communication pathways and receiving processes. Step by step, ask about each aspect of their operation: “How are they receiving the product? How many people inspect the product? How is the product unboxed? Do you put the product together and send me a photo? Do you send me one photo, or 10 photos? Do you unbox every single item in that 100-piece chandelier order, or are you unboxing one? What is your communication like? Do you have a portal? Do you download everything into a software that I can look at? Do you alert us the minute [something arrives,] or do you alert us the month after?”

Working with a designer-led receiving operation offers another layer of protection—and for some, it might make sense to take up that mantle themselves. Particularly for designers in smaller markets, where the costs of commercial property are more attainable, Bishop recommends inquiring about local warehouse and storage spaces.

“If you’re thinking about it, you’ve got to start putting one foot in front of the other,” she says. “Try to find a receiving warehouse. Try to find somebody who can run it that you trust—[start with] one warehouse manager—and then you’ve got to really get good laborers. If you could find something you could afford, or you could find an investor, that will pay off in spades in your storage and receiving costs in general.”

Graci and Magee assessed the viability of their new operation by running projections on the volume of clients, inventory and revenue necessary to generate enough money to cover their receiving business’s rent and expenses. Less than a year later, they’ve already been successful enough to contemplate growth—including, potentially, a larger warehouse, plus delivery and installation services. For now, however, they’re simply enjoying the benefits of successfully troubleshooting a part of the industry that once felt impossible to conquer.

“I had only experienced this business from the designer point of view, but it’s been a great learning experience to do it on the back end,” says Graci. “[Now I’m more in control of the] standards I want to uphold.”