Maersk Takes Over PUMA's US Distribution Network

Maersk has taken over the day-to-day running of PUMA's North American distribution network, three large, highly automated warehouses in the US totalling about 2.3 million square feet, under an expanded contract-logistics agreement announced on 24 September 2026 (Maersk and PUMA press release).

The deal moves PUMA's US fulfilment operation into Maersk's hands while PUMA keeps ownership of the facilities and the automation inside them. It also opens the network to other brands: Maersk will use spare capacity across the sites for other customers, turning PUMA's dedicated warehouses into multi-client facilities.

The deal: what it covers

The agreement hands Maersk operational management of three PUMA distribution centres, all equipped with AutoStore automated storage and retrieval systems (Maersk and PUMA press release, 24 September 2026):

Source: Maersk and PUMA press release, 24 September 2026.

Between them the three sites serve all of PUMA's US channels: its own retail stores, its wholesale customers and its e-commerce orders. The network is sized to handle roughly 20 million units a year (FreightWaves; Supply Chain Dive).

Maersk now manages the facilities, meaning the warehouse labour, the day-to-day operation and the performance of the automated systems. PUMA retains ownership of the buildings and the AutoStore infrastructure it has already invested in. Nothing is being sold and nothing is being stripped out.

Two further elements define the deal. First, the sites become multi-client: Maersk will use available capacity for other customers, and the Torrance facility is being set up as Maersk North America's first AutoStore deployment serving more than one brand, with capacity opened to other customers from 2027 (FreightWaves; The Conveyor). Second, this is an extension of an existing relationship rather than a new one. Maersk already provides PUMA with ocean freight, air freight, customs, inland transport and warehousing and distribution in Europe (FreightWaves). The US DCs are the next piece of a logistics partnership that has been widening for some time.

Maersk's own scale gives a sense of what PUMA is plugging into: more than 70 fulfilment facilities covering around 22.5 million square feet across North America, and over 500 warehouses globally (Maersk and PUMA press release).

Why PUMA is doing it

PUMA's stated reasoning, from its supply chain leadership, is that combining its "highly automated distribution network" with Maersk's "operational expertise, technology, and integrated logistics capabilities" lets it "create greater value from the investments we've made in our US distribution infrastructure" (Maersk and PUMA press release). Maersk's North America contract logistics head framed the general principle: "Many companies are looking for ways to get more value from the logistics infrastructure they've already invested in" (The Conveyor).

There is a commercial backdrop to that. PUMA's North American business has been under pressure: Q2 2026 sales in the region fell around 16.7% on a currency-adjusted basis, which PUMA attributed mainly to weaker consumer demand (as reported). The company has been cutting costs across the group, and converting fixed US warehouse overhead into a managed, shared, partly revenue-generating arrangement is consistent with that. So the move is driven by cost pressure as well as by logistics logic, and it is worth reading it as both.

What PUMA has done, in effect, is separate two decisions that most companies treat as one.

Own the asset, operate the asset: two different decisions

PUMA is keeping the buildings and the automation. It is handing over the operation. That is the distinction at the heart of the deal, and it is one most scaling brands never draw.

Owning fulfilment infrastructure and operating fulfilment infrastructure are two separate decisions. You can do both, either, or neither. PUMA has answered them separately. Should it own the infrastructure? Yes, it already does, and at its scale dedicated automated capacity is a reasonable call. Should running that infrastructure be one of its core competencies? No. Managing warehouse labour, productivity, peak staffing and health and safety is not where PUMA creates value or competitive advantage, so it has given that part to a company whose entire business is running warehouses, and which can fill the spare capacity PUMA cannot.

What brands take on when they open their own warehouse

Most DTC brands bundle the two decisions into one, and that is where the mistake starts. The typical path looks like this. A brand hits a volume where 3PL fees feel expensive, and someone does the back-of-envelope maths: "we're paying the 3PL a margin on every order, if we ran our own warehouse we'd keep that margin." So the brand signs a lease, fits out a space, and congratulates itself on taking fulfilment in-house.

What it has actually taken on, the day the lease is signed, is all of this:

Warehouse labour, and the recruitment to find it. Management and supervision. A warehouse management system to select, implement and run. Peak capacity planning, and the cost of carrying it in the quiet months. Productivity and throughput. Health and safety, and the liability that comes with it. Equipment, racking and maintenance. Returns processing. Carrier management and rate negotiation. And a large fixed cost base that is the same whether the warehouse is full or half empty.

None of that is a product. None of it is the thing the brand's customers buy. It is operational overhead that the brand has decided, usually without framing it as a decision, to make a core competency. And running a warehouse well is a genuine competency, it is Maersk's entire business, with over 70 facilities and 22.5 million square feet in North America alone. It is not something you become good at as a side effect of selling hoodies.

What this means if you run a scaling brand

You will never own 2.3 million square feet. But the decision PUMA just made is the decision a $5m to $100m DTC brand faces in miniature every time someone suggests opening an owned warehouse, and most brands get it wrong because they never separate the two questions.

Do not ask "are we big enough to own a warehouse?" That is the wrong question, and it is the one brands usually ask. It leads to the lease, the fit-out, and the slow realisation that you have hired yourself into the warehouse-operating business. Ask instead: does operating a warehouse ourselves actually give us a competitive advantage? For almost every DTC brand, the answer is no. Your advantage is your product and your customer relationship. Fulfilment is something you need done well, not something that makes you win, and "done well" is exactly what a good 3PL sells.

Separate owning from operating in your own decisions. There are genuine reasons a growing brand might want dedicated space or control over its fulfilment, peak reliability, a specific location, custom handling for a fragile or high-value product. But "we have the volume now" is a reason to negotiate a better 3PL deal or a dedicated-space arrangement inside a 3PL, not necessarily a reason to take on labour, WMS, health and safety and a fixed-cost building. You can often get the control you actually want without taking on the operation you do not.

Count the whole cost, not the 3PL margin. The in-house case almost always compares "3PL fees" against "rent," and ignores labour, recruitment, management, systems, equipment, peak carrying cost and the fixed base that does not flex when volume dips. The signs that a brand has got this wrong are the same ones that show up when a 3PL relationship has gone bad: cost creeping, service slipping, and management time disappearing into a function that was supposed to run itself. We wrote about the signs it is time to leave your 3PL, and the same diagnostic applies to the decision to leave in the first place.

Idle capacity is pure cost. The cleverest part of PUMA's deal is that spare space becomes someone else's problem, and even a revenue source. A brand that owns or commits to fixed fulfilment capacity is paying for it whether it is full or not, and the quiet months are where owned-warehouse economics quietly bleed. A 3PL, or a shared arrangement like the one Maersk is building, spreads that cost across many customers. Unless you can reliably fill the space you commit to, every empty shelf is margin you are paying to store air.

The underlying discipline is the one that runs through all of this: know which parts of your operation create advantage and which parts simply need to work. Spend your capital and your management attention on the first. Buy the second from people who do it for a living. PUMA, under pressure, just re-learned that lesson across 2.3 million square feet. It is cheaper to learn it before you sign the lease.

If you are weighing an owned warehouse against staying with a 3PL, or trying to work out whether your fulfilment is actually costing you an advantage or just costing you money, see how we work.