White Glove Delivery

White glove delivery goes beyond dropping freight at a dock or doorstep. It's a full-service delivery experience where trained personnel bring the product inside the building, place it in the designated room or location, unpack it, assemble it if needed, and remove all packaging materials. The service exists because some products – large furniture, high-end appliances, medical equipment, trade show displays – require careful handling and customer-facing professionalism that standard freight delivery doesn't provide.

White glove services are priced as premium accessorials or through specialized last-mile carriers that focus exclusively on this type of delivery. Costs are significantly higher than threshold or curbside delivery – often $150–$500+ per delivery depending on the product weight, number of items, flight of stairs, and services required. Scheduling is also more complex because white glove deliveries require specific time windows, customer coordination, and often pre-delivery communication that standard freight doesn't involve.

For home goods brands and furniture companies, white glove delivery is often the customer's most tangible interaction with the brand's logistics. A damaged product, missed delivery window, or unprofessional crew directly impacts brand perception and return rates. Tracking and managing these deliveries with the same rigor as commercial freight – carrier performance scorecards, on-time metrics, exception alerts – is essential for shippers who treat delivery experience as a competitive differentiator.

The challenge for logistics teams managing white glove alongside standard freight is visibility. White glove carriers are often smaller, regional operators with limited tracking technology. Without pulling their delivery data into the same system that tracks your FTL and LTL shipments, the logistics team is blind to the deliveries that matter most to customer satisfaction.