The Brands That Stopped Hiring for Peak Season: What They Did Instead

At Innovation Delivered 2026, on the panel “Scale Your Operations Without Scaling Your Team,” two operators explained how they did the opposite. Ned Woodward, director of logistics and fulfillment at Spiceology, said his team hasn’t made a single seasonal hire in three years, despite absorbing a 30 to 40% jump in order volume each peak season. Maïré BAVARDAY-ROSA, CEO of ecomspaces, said the same team that ships 500 orders a day can scale to 3,000 without adding headcount.

Growth doesn’t have to mean growing headcount. Here’s how they rethought peak season staffing instead.

Why peak-season hiring became the default fix

During the panel, moderator Lexi Kenneally, Senior Project Manager of ShipStation Global, shared a stat that explains why so many sellers keep hiring: 67% of ecommerce operators are running a shipping workflow built for a previous stage of growth. Most built it years ago, when their business shipped a fraction of today’s volume, and never rebuilt it as things scaled. The workflow doesn’t break outright. It just quietly turns into the reason you need more people every time volume spikes.

That gap is exactly what pushes so many teams back into peak season staffing mode instead of fixing the workflow underneath it. At Spiceology, peak season used to mean bringing on seasonal help every year, then managing the fallout once volume dropped and the team had to shrink back down.

BAVARDAY-ROSA sees the same pattern from the outside, working with founders who build their own fulfillment operations. For her, the obstacle isn’t technology. It’s mindset: founders, she said, “don’t see building systems as an investment” until volume forces the issue.

Both operators had to get comfortable trusting a system before they’d let go of the old peak season staffing routine.

What they built instead of a bigger team

At Spiceology, the fix started with automating a single task: labeling. One customer required specific ship-from locations and third-party billing codes on every order, and Woodward’s team was entering that information by hand. Woodward said, “Before we automated this, we were spending three or four hours a day on these efforts. Once we automated that piece and tested it through the system, we had an immediate 84% time savings on just that specific customer.” 

He pushed the data straight from Spiceology’s ERP into ShipStation’s order management using automation rules, so the system filled in the correct ship-from location and billing code on its own. Before it ever touched a live order, he tested the setup in a sandbox environment and watched for what broke.

At ecomspaces, BAVARDAY-ROSA builds similar guardrails for the brands she onboards, most of which arrive with no systems in place at all. She starts with carrier mapping: routing each order to the carrier a customer picked, or the cheapest option, without anyone checking by hand. From there, she builds automations for anything that repeats. She said, “If they want to use special packaging for a specific SKU, we create an automation for that. Look at the SKU, create a trigger. When this SKU is in the order, use extra packaging, or add something specific.”

Both started the same way: pick one decision, automate it, then move to the next.

Three peak seasons, one team

This isn’t a one-off for either operator. It’s the same pattern showing up in both operations, just at a different scale, as the numbers below show.

For Woodward, the payoff went beyond the budget. Skipping the seasonal hiring cycle also meant skipping the training curve and the added management load a bigger, temporary team brings. 

“It’s been not only a cost savings, but a lot less stress for our management team,” he said, “not having to manage additional staff, just taking care of the team we have.”

Here’s what swapping peak season staffing for automation actually looks like in the numbers:

• Spiceology: 3 consecutive peak seasons, 0 seasonal hires, 30–40% more orders absorbed each time
• ecomspaces: 500 → 3,000 orders a day, same headcount, 6x the volume

Where to start before your next peak season

Neither operator solves peak season staffing overnight, and both offered the same core advice: start now, before volume forces your hand.

• Test before you trust. Before any automation touches a live order, Woodward runs it in a sandbox first: “We were able to test in a sandbox environment in our ERP, push some of that automation into ShipStation, and watch what broke so we could go back and fix it on the front end.”
• Write it down before you build it. BAVARDAY-ROSA’s rule: “Write down all your processes, write down everything in your business…Keep it simple. Know what you’re doing right now, and know what you want it to look like.”

And don’t wait for volume to force the decision.

That’s the takeaway from the session: peak-season staffing isn’t the fix—automated decision-making is. 

Alexandra Passmore

More articles by Alexandra Passmore