At Boxzooka, CEO Brendan Heegan has grown his company by 3,097% over the last three years, fitting into a space where he’s going up against the Fulfillment by Amazon service that the giant online retailer offers to third-party merchants selling on its site.
The company was 119th on this year’s list. In 2019, it wasn’t on the list at all.
“The beauty of what we do is that none of our clients sell on Amazon and most of them would never think of it,” believing that using their own websites and acting as a third-party seller is “beneath them.” But they need a company to outsource the fulfillment activities for their sales, and that’s where Boxzooka comes in.
The roughly $20 million business began in 2014 just providing software for retailers bringing in imported goods. But once in place, it became a natural progression to provide other fulfillment services, eventually leading Boxzooka to brick-and-mortar space in New Jersey, where the company is based, as well as the West Coast and Pennsylvania.
Boxzooka has about 60 employees but Heegan said temporary employees can add another 100 to the workforce at any given time.
Boxzooka’s list of customers does contain what Heegan said were “a lot of fashion clients,” with fashion overall not performing well during the pandemic. “Some of them have gone up and some have gone down, but we’ve just been pretty stable and even-keeled through the pandemic.”
The company got into fashion early in its tenure because “not every 3PL is good at it, and we’re excellent at it.” But he added Boxzooka doesn’t want to be “pigeonholed” in that field and has been diversifying.
Article written by John Kingston of Freight Waves.
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