Customer Photos: A 3PL Pick Face Built From 2,508 Stack-and-Hang Bins

Customer Photos: A 3PL Pick Face Built From 2,508 Stack-and-Hang Bins - Industrial 4 Less

A New Jersey 3PL called us on a Friday with a problem most warehouses know well: a new brand was about to land at their dock, and the pick face wasn’t built yet. They needed a wall of bins installed before the inventory arrived — not after.

Six days later, FedEx Freight rolled up with 13 pallets of Quantum QUS238 stack-and-hang bins. The photos in this post are what the team built with them — one more example in our growing library of high-volume bin deliveries for large-scale fulfillment operations.

3PL warehouse pick face built from Quantum QUS238 stack-and-hang bins in yellow, blue, green, and black on louvered panels.

The order, by the numbers

  • 2,508 Quantum QUS238 18″ x 5-1/2″ x 5″ hopper-front bins
  • 209 cartons across four colors — Blue (1,092), Yellow (696), Green (492), Black (228)
  • Extremely aggressive volume pricing — freight included
  • 13 pallets, FedEx Freight LTL, factory-direct
  • Order placed Tuesday. Delivered the following Monday.

The job: a 3PL pick face that had to be ready yesterday

A modern 3PL pick face has a few non-negotiables, and they line up almost exactly with the principles in our order picking bins selection & efficiency guide:

  1. Density. A lot of SKU homes packed into the smallest possible footprint — one of the core arguments in our writeup on setting up a small parts picking system.
  2. Visibility. Pickers shouldn’t have to dig — open hopper fronts, clear sightlines. (Same reason customers love our open-front stacking bins and clear open-front storage bins.)
  3. Modularity. Bins need to hang on louvered panels and stack on shelf when needs change. The QUS238 lives natively in our louvered panels with bins and pick racks with bins systems.
  4. Toughness. This stuff gets handled thousands of times a month. Cheap bins crack — and that’s the whole reason commercial-grade plastic beats residential bins in any real warehouse.

Add a fifth requirement when you’re an incubator-style 3PL onboarding new brands every quarter: wayfinding. Your pickers won’t have a year of muscle memory to fall back on. The rack itself has to teach them where things live.

That’s why this customer ordered four colors on purpose. The wall in the photos isn’t decoration — it’s a map. Each color block is a SKU family. A new picker walks up day one and the layout does half the training for them.

Color-coded SKU storage in a distribution center: blue, green, and yellow Quantum stack-and-hang bins mounted on louvered panels in pallet rack.

Why the QUS238

The Quantum QUS238 sits in our Quantum Ultra Stack and Hang Bins collection — an 18″-deep hopper-front bin molded from FDA-approved high-density polypropylene. The spec sheet, in plain English:

  • Rear hanging lip drops onto louvered panels and rails — no hardware required (browse the full louvered panels, racks & rail systems line)
  • Wide stacking ledge with anti-slide lock so towers don’t drift
  • Front, back, and side grips for fast handling
  • Guaranteed not to crack or break under normal load
  • Autoclavable to 250°F, freezer-safe — useful in everything from a dry-goods 3PL to a walk-in freezer or cooler buildout
  • Available in seven colors plus optional dividers, clear covers, windows, and labels
  • Sold in cartons of 12

It’s the bin we recommend more than any other when somebody walks in saying “I need to build a pick face,” and it’s the same family that shows up in our writeups on the QUS248 in hardware retail and the QUS250 for optimized order picking. It hangs, it stacks, it survives, and it scales.

How we pulled it off in six days

The hard part wasn’t the bins. It was the timing.

When the call came in, the first move was a stock check across all seven QUS238 colors at the Quantum factory. There were a little over 3,400 pieces on the floor — but they were split across colors, and not in the proportions the customer wanted. They didn’t need a rainbow. They needed 2,500 bins in four specific colors, palletized, ready to leave the dock the next morning.

Here’s what made it work — and it’s the same playbook we ran for the operation in why Amazon chose Industrial 4 Less for their fulfillment centers:

  • Quantum factory-direct. No distributor middleman, no extra handoff, no markup stack.
  • Extremely aggressive volume pricing, locked in same day. Freight included.
  • Priority pull and stage. The factory pulled other orders aside so this one could ship first.
  • Single LTL shipment. 13 pallets on one BOL, one tracking number, one delivery window.

While we worked the order through the factory, the customer had their pallet rack and louvered panels staged on their end. Truck arrived, pallets came off, bins went up. No surprises, no missing pieces, no second shipment chasing the first — the kind of single-clean-shipment outcome we describe in our guide to enhancing warehouse organization with real-world applications.

Quantum stack-and-hang bins in yellow and blue installed in a warehouse pick face.

What this looks like, finished

That’s a 3PL pick face — built fast, designed to scale, and ready for whichever brand walks through the door next. If you’re thinking about replicating the layout, our warehouse shelf organization case study is the most useful companion read — same product family, different industry, similar lift in pick speed.

If you’re building a pick face, or rebuilding one, this is the bin we’d put in front of you, and these are the categories we’d send you to first:

Related reading

Need bins like this for your warehouse?

We carry the full Quantum stack-and-hang line — every size, every color, every accessory (dividers, clear covers, windows, labels). For volume orders we routinely beat list pricing by a wide margin and include freight. The team that handled this order can handle yours.

Talk to us:

Customer Photos