In 1989, Andrew Perrin launched a traditional freight forwarding business, with a very small team of only three or four people. As Hemisphere Freight Services customers grew, so did the business itself, and today Andrew Perrin’s sons, Louis and Craig Perrin are Directors of a company with a team of over 170 logistics experts.
“The customers who were with us from the very beginning are still our customers today,” Louis Perrin points out. “We build strong, long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships with the focus on adding value to our customers’ businesses by contributing to operational efficiency and providing solutions and services that help them to meet their business goals. In order to support our customers’ operations and growth ambitions we have worked tirelessly to expand our expertise, services, and logistics infrastructure accordingly.”
To that end, Hemisphere Freight current runs six locations strategically located around the UK. The company headquarters are based in Ipswich and is the home to the company’s ocean freight, customs clearance, project logistics, export packing, UK and European Road Freight teams.
The company also runs its own warehousing infrastructure across the region that offers long and short-term, bonded and non-bonded, secure storage solutions with 24/7 surveillance, and 3PL fulfilment services.
The company’s air freight division is based at London Heathrow, with an attached warehouse to serve the e-commerce and pharmaceutical sectors. Further north, in Skelmersdale, Hemisphere Freight has an office and warehouse that serves the whole Northwest of the country.
By keeping its infrastructure close to national logistics infrastructure, Hemisphere Freight is able to give itself and its customers a leading edge.
“Uniquely as a medium-sized, family-run logistics company, we own our own infrastructure,” says Andy Perrin, Managing Director of Hemisphere Freight Services. “We own the buildings ourselves which gives us control over their design and allows us to make sure they are fit for purpose.”
Taking the headache out of logistics
Hemisphere Freight’s ambition is not just to work closely with its customers, but to act as an extension of, or as their own dedicated logistics team. To do that, Hemisphere Freight must know, understand, and care about its customers’ logistics and business as much as they do while being able to cover its customers’ every logistics need within its portfolio of services.
“Although we are growing, we remain a very personable, passionate and caring company,” Louis Perrin says. “We have always gone the extra mile for our customers. We are flexible and agile and can react quickly to changes at the push of a button to add services to our repertoire.”
Perrin points to the example of a customer who had experienced delays on a big infrastructure project. The customer had its production line, but Hemisphere Freight took that production line in-house at short notice, allowing the customer to meet their schedule for the project.
“Our infrastructure is a great selling point,” adds Craig Perrin, another Director in the firm. “We operate port-centric warehousing facilities with numerous benefits for our clients, including reducing transport miles across the country. We can transport a container 10 or 20 miles down the road, saving transportation costs, time, and carbon emissions across the supply chain.”
Hemisphere Freight adds value by examining its clients’ entire supply chain, looking for ways to be more efficient, save time and money, and enhance customer service. Rather than looking at the cost of transportation on a shipment-by-shipment basis, Hemisphere Freight takes a more holistic view, analysing the end-to-end supply chain, looking to optimise everything into a well-oiled machine creating far greater benefits.
As Craig Perrin points out, “We help the client make an informed decision so that across their bigger picture we can deliver three things; cost savings, improved service and decrease the resources and time and money that go into logistics.”
An Expert Team
All of this is possible thanks to Hemisphere Freight’s expert team of over 170 people. Louis Perrin himself describes them as “Some of the very best people in the logistics industry.”
“They are people with brilliant experience in the industry, but also the right values,” Louis Perrin tells us. “We always offer a solution to our customers and deliver what they need us to deliver. We deliver what our clients need us to deliver.”
Of course, with a company that has been growing as much as Hemisphere Freight, it can be a challenge to maintain the values that made the company great when it was smaller.
“As we are a family company, we wanted to retain those values as we have grown,” Andy Perrin reflects. “What we look for in terms of recruitment is people that not only have experience, because we are more than happy to give training in the industry, but people who share our values.”
Andy Perrin is the first to admit that not many people come straight out of university or college looking for a career in logistics, but he also argues it is a sector with many opportunities.
“We operate port-centric warehousing facilities, and trucking operations which offers numerous benefits to our customers supply chains, saving transportation costs, time, and carbon emissions,” he says.
Continuing Growth
Hemisphere Freight has grown a great deal, but even now Perrin tells us it has warehousing facilities that are over capacity.
“We have got a big couple of years ahead,” Andy Perrin points out. “We are investing in a brand-new warehousing facility. We do not want to stunt our clients’ growth or force them to look for other solutions. So, we have invested heavily in a new site at the Port One Logistics Park, just outside of Ipswich near Felixstowe.”
The new facility will be home to 244,000 square feet of warehousing, with 36,000 racked pallets over nine racking levels, taking advantage of the full height of the building, every bit of space will be utilised. The facility will have dock levelling facilities and semiautomated VNA trucks that will self-drive the operator to where they need to be.
“We have seen that where there is a lack of warehousing space, customers are storing products across so many different warehouses and providers that it becomes really inefficient,” Louis Perrin says. “It means multiple IT integrations are needed, and customer service and costs are inefficient, so this facility will help clients consolidate and reap the benefits.”
It will be East Anglia’s first carbon-neutral logistics park, with solar-panelled roofing to generate enough energy to power the electrics of the building. Eventually, it will generate enough energy to put back into the grid.
The new, highly secure site will be BRC accredited for food products, with TAPA accreditation as well.
When we spoke to Louis Perrin, he had just attended the British International Freight Association awards, where Hemisphere Freight Services took first place in the Project Forwarding category.
