How Altitude Sports Rebuilt Packaging For Their Apparel Catalog

If you ship apparel, you know this story. Your packages are light. Your carriers don't care. They charge on volume, not weight, and every cubic inch of empty space is a line item on your next invoice.

Altitude Sports lives this at scale. The Montreal-based outdoor retailer ships over 1.2 million orders a year. Jackets, base layers, ski gear, shoes. Most of it light, much of it soft, most of it getting dim-weighted on the way out the door.

They already had cartonization. It came built into their WMS. It wasn't enough.

This is the story of what they did about it, and the part of the project that turned out to matter more than the algorithm. To break it down, I spoke with Kosta Cherezov and Dan Norton at Paccurate, who led the build with Altitude's team. Kosta ran the day-to-day implementation. Dan worked on the broader integration and the structural decisions around rule ownership.

What’s Inside

1. Where built-in cartonization breaks on apparel

2. The two rules that moved the math

3. Why Altitude pulled packing rules out of their WMS

4. The numbers behind the 18-point mailer jump

5. Five signals you should be looking at this

6. Four takeaways that apply beyond cartonization

Where Built-in Cartonization Fell Short

Most WMS platforms ship with a cartonization engine. It reads the order, checks your available boxes, picks one. For a lot of operations, that's fine.

For Altitude, it missed in two specific places.

The Item Problem

The WMS modeled every item as a rigid object with fixed dimensions. A jacket is not a ski boot. One compresses, one doesn't. But the system treated both the same, which meant compressible apparel got packed into boxes sized for items that don't compress. Empty space in every shipment, multiplied across a million-plus orders a year.

The Mailer Problem

Altitude was using mailers, but not as much as they should have been. Mailers are cheaper than boxes when the item allows it, and they absorb less dim-weight damage because they conform to what's inside. The catch is that most WMS platforms model a mailer the same way they model a box: a rigid container with fixed dimensions. A mailer expands and contracts based on contents. If your system can't represent that, it under-recommends mailers and defaults to boxes.

As Kosta Cherezov at Paccurate put it: "WMS treats the mailer as a rigid container with a fixed set of dimensions. But we know that actually a mailer can get bigger or smaller based on what you put inside of it."

Two gaps, same root cause. The WMS was modeling packaging the way software finds it easy to model, not the way it actually behaves on the floor.

The Fix: Two Rules That Changed The Math

Altitude brought in Paccurate, a cartonization platform their WMS partner Deposco recommended. Two rules did most of the work.

Alternate Dimensions

Every soft item got tagged with a compression factor:

• C10 items shrink 10% when packed

• C30 items shrink 30%

• Categories got flagged based on what the Altitude team knew about each one

The cartonization engine then ran the math against the compressed dimensions, not the rack dimensions. Same item, smaller footprint, smaller box, smaller dim-weight charge.

Dynamic Mailer Modeling

Instead of treating each mailer as a fixed-dimension container, the system modeled each mailer size as a flexible envelope that expands within known limits. A mailer that was previously rejected because the WMS thought items wouldn't fit became viable. Mailer recommendations went up. Box recommendations for items that didn't need a box went down.

Neither rule is conceptually hard. The work was in identifying which items got which compression flags, which mailers had which expansion ranges, and how the rules interacted on orders with mixed contents. Once those were defined, the algorithm did its job.

Making Packing Rules Accessible

Altitude started working with Paccurate in early in the year. The plan at that point was straightforward. Compression rules, mailer logic, item flags would all be configured inside Deposco, Altitude's WMS. But this would have required a custom integration on the Deposco side, with future rule changes routed through the same process. Paccurate came up with a better approach. 

They'd been building a system internally that let customers manage rules directly on Paccurate's side, in a UI separate from the WMS. 

Deposco still handled the order data and received Paccurate's packing decision. But the compression rules, mailer definitions, and item flags now lived on Paccurate's side, in a self-serve interface Altitude's logistics team could edit directly. Adding a new mailer size, changing a compression factor, flagging an item category - all of it became a few clicks instead of a ticket.

Dan Norton at Paccurate described the dynamic the new approach addressed:

"There's tension between operations and IT when it comes to cartonization. IT owns the tool, in the sense that they built the integration. But operators are the ones that use it. They're the ones that know what the packing rules need to be."

Moving the rules to ops meant the people closest to the floor could easily change them without routing every change through a separate team. 

Results

Three numbers stood out after launch:

• Mailer utilization: 60% → 78% (+18 pts)

• Fill rate in the first month: +6%

• Packer training time: -15%

A few things behind those numbers.