When a well-known publication reaches out wanting to feature your brand, the first feeling is genuine excitement. A big name. Real visibility. The kind of email you read twice just to make sure you got it right.
Then you get to the ask.
8,000 units. For free. In exchange for newsletter coverage and what they called sustained visibility. No payment, just the products. A few months earlier, a different well-known name had done the same thing, and by this point I understood that for certain large publications, asking a small brand for thousands of units at no cost is apparently just normal. They ask. They assume you'll say yes for the exposure. They move on if you don't.
We said no. And then, interestingly, they came back. They actually needed us. We negotiated down to a much smaller volume, agreed on a proper fee and terms we were comfortable with, and our team started preparing the stock. We were ready to work overtime to meet their tight launch deadline.
What followed was one of the most exhausting and revealing partnerships we have been part of.
The Monday that never existed
We finalised the terms on a Friday. She wanted delivery by Monday morning. Monday. For a large shipment that needed packing, express courier booking, and logistics coordination. She seemed to expect the products would simply appear at her warehouse over the weekend, the way you order something on an app and forget about it until it arrives at your door.
We explained that Monday was not possible. The fastest we could do with express was Thursday. We asked her to confirm and send the warehouse details so we could begin booking the driver.
She didn't reply that Friday.
Our team worked through the weekend anyway because we had committed and wanted to move as fast as possible. We followed up on Saturday. Sunday. Monday came, and we still had no warehouse address, no contact number, and no reply at all. The deadline she had pushed so hard for arrived, and she simply was not there. We had worked the weekend for someone who had disappeared at their own deadline.
Three days later, a new deadline
On Thursday, she reappeared with an excuse. She had been off. Could we now deliver by the end of the week, or the following Monday at the latest?
I looked at this message for a while. She had created an impossible deadline, pushed hard for it, gone completely silent through the entire critical window, and was now casually proposing a new one as if the previous week hadn't happened.
We arranged express shipping at additional cost, chased the warehouse details again, got them eventually but unclearly, pieced together the booking process from incomplete instructions, and kept moving because the products were packed and the team had already given up their weekend.
We were hours away from the delivery date when the message arrived that I will not forget.
"Have you contacted our warehouse to pre-book? If you haven't, they will refuse the pallets."
The evening before delivery
The night before the delivery date, she sent a message asking whether we had contacted her warehouse directly to pre-book the delivery slot. If we hadn't, the pallets would have been turned away at the gate.
Her warehouse. Her supplier relationship. Her launch. She had never contacted them herself. She had sent unclear instructions, disappeared for days during the most critical window, and was now the evening before delivery, telling us we needed to call her own internal team to arrange access for a shipment she had been demanding for weeks.
We panicked. If those pallets came back after everything our team had done, I would have lost my mind. Our PR contact called her repeatedly just to get her to act. She eventually called her own warehouse team herself and came back to tell us they might be busy in the morning so our driver may have to wait.
That was the moment I understood. All her deadlines had been fake. None of them were real constraints. She had been pushing urgency onto us while applying none to herself.
We had worked the weekend, paid for express shipping, chased every piece of information that should have been provided upfront, and the whole time, her warehouse wasn't even booked.
I stopped following her instructions like a sheep after that.
The contract with the hidden extras
While all of this was happening, the contract arrived. The liability clause extended all the way to her end customers, meaning if a subscriber received a product and had a complaint, somehow that would become our responsibility. We have no visibility over how they store the products, repackage them, or what happens between our warehouse and their subscribers' doors. We removed the clause, rewrote it to something mutual, and sent it back.
And noticed, while reading closely, a quietly added request for extra free samples that had never been mentioned once in any conversation. Just slipped in, hoping we wouldn't look closely enough.
We looked closely.
The damage claim and the nerve
The goods were delivered and signed for with no exceptions noted. A week later, a damage claim arrived. Over a hundred units are leaking and defective. We had sent handling instructions more than once, had asked specifically how they planned to repackage the products before shipping to subscribers, and never received a clear answer. Now a damage claim with a number that changed between messages, first one figure then a different one, with no explanation for the difference.
Here is how you know a damage claim is not real: when the replacement request is framed around a new campaign rather than around fixing specific customers who actually received a broken product.
If the damage was genuine, the ask would be: these twelve customers received a leaking unit, can you replace them? Instead, the ask was: we need more units for a new campaign promotion. The changing numbers made it even more obvious. This was not a defect report. It was an attempt to get more free stock through the back door.
After all the chaos she had caused, with the invoice still unpaid, on a deal that was already a significant discount from what it should have cost her, she had the nerve to ask for more for free. That takes a special kind of confidence.
The invoice and the visibility
They quoted strong newsletter open rates. Of course, they were strong. The gift was free for subscribers. That is not a difficult number to achieve when you are giving something away. The actual placement, the sustained visibility they had pitched, turned out to be a hidden landing page several clicks deep that subscribers would only find if they already knew to look.
The invoice sat unpaid for weeks. New supplier setup. Contract still with legal. Always one more step before payment could move. When I pushed for seven days, they said big companies take a month.
I pointed out that she had been demanding we meet her deadlines for weeks while never once meeting any of ours. This was already a heavily discounted deal that was never supposed to be a free exchange. The same company that had opened this relationship, asking for 8,000 units at no cost, was now struggling to pay a straightforward bill long after delivery.
Looking back
I feel genuinely stupid about the beginning of this. I followed her instructions like a sheep because I assumed that a company with that kind of big name must operate professionally. Surely the urgency is real. Surely they have their logistics sorted. They didn't.
And I want to be fair, because not every big company is like this. We have worked with large organisations that were efficient, respectful, and genuinely good partners.
This one was different. Large organisations have many people inside them, and some act like divas precisely because the company name gives them cover.
You can be flexible. But there is a limit, and that limit is your own terms. Stay with your policy. If a deadline is genuinely important to them, they will meet your conditions to make it work rather than expecting you to follow their chaos like a sheep. And honestly, if they are missing their own deadlines, that is their problem to solve, not yours to absorb.
