Eighteen months into running Tackle Grab, which sells fishing gear by monthly subscription, co-founder and CEO Stash Karandanis had had enough. The company had 2,000 subscribers and was growing fast. But Karandanis was still doing all the fulfillment--carefully packing merchandise into boxes, pasting mailing labels on them, and arranging for shipment--at his home in East Sandwich, Massachusetts.
"Crazy is an understatement," he says. "All of the logistics and shipping was in my basement. It took 12 days to do 2,000 kits." Karandanis and his co-founder, Owen Hall, scrambled to hire a fulfillment service in nearby Boston, but couldn't find a reasonably priced option. Then Riley Life Logistics in Raleigh, North Carolina, quoted a much lower price. Going with Riley freed up nearly half a month's time for Karandanis to focus on other tasks--and today Tackle Grab has more than 15,000 members.
Tackle Grab's tale has a happy ending, but many e-commerce companies find fulfillment vexing. With shipping and logistics in-house, costs may be kept down, but eventually, finding a partner is essential for managing growth and sanity. Resources like crafts marketplace Etsy, easy-to-use e-commerce shipping software like ShipStation, and e-commerce platforms like Shopify make it simple to set up a business online. But fulfillment is still time-consuming, complicated--and, well, scary.
"No one is going to care about your product more than you do, and you're entrusting that to a third party," says Karandanis. "It's terrifying."
Particularly for newer companies. Jen Resnick is the founder of Wala Swim, an online swimsuit retailer for women that buys from vendors worldwide. Bringing all her different products into one fulfillment center and delegating all the sorting and specialized packing and packaging to a partner seemed like too big a risk for her young company.