Peak season has a funny reputation in retail. For some, it’s the moment dreams are realised. For others, it’s where things unravel fast. Late nights, anxious dashboards, customer inboxes lighting up. It’s the part of the year everyone prepares for, and secretly hopes will just… work.

At Shiperoo, we’ve always believed that peak shouldn’t feel like survival mode. It should feel earned. Calm, confident, even joyful. And this year, as the dust settled after our biggest retail peak to date, that belief finally felt real.

Across our Victorian fulfilment centres and our NSW site, something special happened. Not because of one big moment, but because of hundreds of small ones. Slack channels buzzing with updates. Records being broken daily, weekly, site-wide, then broken again. Teams pausing for tools-down moments, exchanging high fives, beaming smiles, and quiet nods that said, we’ve got this.

While volumes surged, the experience didn’t buckle. Same-day and next-day dispatch continued across the network, with each site moving more than ten thousand orders a day, calmly, consistently, and with purpose.

It wasn’t chaos. It was rhythm.

Planning isn’t paperwork, it’s peace of mind

Months earlier, Shiperoo released Mastering Retail Peak, a reflection on what really underpins success during the most demanding time of year. The message was simple: peak success isn’t about reacting faster, it’s about planning deeper and earlier, with flexibility built in.

That philosophy guided everything this season.

Instead of one rigid forecast, multiple game plans were created. Customers were brought into the process early, their growth paths and pressure points understood in detail. Systems were stress-tested, automation tuned, and labour and freight partners aligned well ahead of time, not just on expected volume, but on how to move together when reality inevitably shifted.

Because it always does.

Chris Caminiti, Shiperoo’s COO, puts it plainly: peak isn’t about one perfect plan. It’s about having a playbook for when things pivot. Different phases. Different levers. Clear ownership. And the confidence to act, not react.

That mindset carried through every site, every shift, every handover.

When systems and people truly sync

Peak is often talked about in numbers. But what stays with you are the scenes.

Automation humming late into the night. Team leads checking in with people on the floor before checking dashboards. Engineers and operations sitting side by side, tweaking and fixing as soon as something needed attention. Customers kept informed, not just when everything was smooth, but when decisions had to be made quickly.

Rizan Mawzoon, CXO at Shiperoo, describes this peak as legendary, not because of scale, but because of how the team showed up. Calm under pressure. Disciplined. United. Like a great rugby side, advancing one clean set piece after another.

Energy mattered. Motivation mattered. Celebrating wins as they happened mattered. Each record broken added momentum, not pressure. And when the days were long, the purpose was clear.

This was the vision Shiperoo had always chased - people, automation and software working in sync, with trust at the centre.

A partner’s perspective: Hommey

For retailers, peak season is deeply personal. It’s their brand, their promise, their most important moment of the year.

Justin Kestelman, Founder of Hommey, experienced that partnership firsthand during Hommey’s largest peak season yet, following a period of rapid growth, the kind that can stretch even the strongest operations.

“What Shiperoo delivered for us wasn’t just fulfilment, it was confidence,” Kestelman says. “From day one, it felt like we were planning peak together, not handing it off and hoping for the best.”

Weeks before peak, Shiperoo’s team challenged assumptions, asked the hard questions and helped shape a plan that could flex as forecasts changed. Visibility stayed high throughout, even as demand surged.

“The difference was the preparation,” Kestelman adds. “When volumes ramped up, there was a real sense of calm. That doesn’t happen by accident.”

The result was night and day. Where previous peaks felt heavy, this one felt breezy despite significantly higher volume. Stock flowed in. Orders flowed out. Customer service stayed sharp and human.

“This was our biggest peak yet,” Kestelman reflects, “and somehow it was the least stressful. Shiperoo took a huge weight off our team so we could stay focused on growth, not firefighting.”

That’s what trust looks like in practice.

Why this matters beyond one season

Today, Shiperoo supports customers that collectively represent more than 2,300 product brands across our network, spanning marketplaces, pure-play eCommerce and increasingly complex omnichannel models. It’s a number that’s largely unheard of, but more importantly, it represents thousands of individual promises being made to end-customers every single day.

Designing a fulfilment model that can flex across all of those distribution styles is no small task, and reflecting on that number alone brings a real sense of pride in the team and the systems they’ve built.

Just as importantly, Shiperoo’s growth continues to be shaped by its customers. Their ideas, feedback and ambition actively influence what comes next, including the decision to open the company’s next fulfilment centre in Queensland, driven directly by customer collaboration and demand.

Peak season will always be intense. But it doesn’t have to be catastrophic.

When planning turns into confidence, when systems earn trust, and when teams are celebrated along the way, peak becomes something else entirely. A milestone worth marking. A story worth telling.

And a reminder that when preparation meets belief, dreams really do get fulfilled.