Shipwire CEO Damon Schechter started his company with a simple goal: “To help small businesses take on the efficiencies that big businesses have.”
He cofounded the Palo Alto-based order fulfillment services operation with chief technology officer Evan Robinson at the end of 2006, but to get there, he had to wait until the timing was right.
Schechter had been in the tech and shipping world since the 90s, but took a break after the dotcom crash of the early 2000s to write a book on logistics. An interview with Costco’s head of logistic helped him figure out what he should do next: Find a way to give smaller companies the same logistical efficiencies
But at the time, the market wasn’t ready yet.
Back in the early 2000s, consumers as a whole were just not accustomed to doing a lot of online shopping. By 2006, that had changed. Shipwire built a platform that would work with merchants’ sales software, set up warehouses internationally, and began to ship products on behalf of businesses.
The main idea was to make it possible for small companies to have a third party store and ship their wares so they didn’t have to take on the enormous job themselves. Tiny companies trying to ship a large volume of orders can only answer their own phones and lick their own stamps for so long, and outsourcing locally has its limitations, Schechter says.
“There’s a whole tech world that you can’t really handle yourself or locally with local help. You need a bigger partner. But the problem is the big, big partners are helping the Target and the Walmart. Who helps the little guy? We fill that void.”
Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost , designers of an iPhone 4 stand and tripod mount called the Glif, turned to Shipwire after going through the pain of shipping 500 orders themselves. When business took off, the logistics company shipped 7,000 orders in a single day.
Small businesses with big shipping needs make up a segment that has grown bigger in recent years with the success of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Now, newbie entrepreneurs can start taking orders for products they’ve never even manufactured, and then all of a sudden have to take on the logistics of getting them produced, stored, and shipped, sometimes internationally.
“Brands are going to market faster than ever before,” Schechter says. “Kickstarter is allowing a guy with an idea the opportunity to sell 5 to 50,000 products without an idea of how to ship one of them.” And the explosion of 3-D printing has made prototyping a much faster process, shortening the time it takes to get products out the door.
Shipwire offers its customers seven warehouses in the U.S., Canada, China and the UK, and expects to bring on Germany, Brazil and Australia soon. It also integrates with a company’s existing order capture systems—including partners like Amazon and eBay —so that customers can see real time shipping rates as well as inventory status. And like other major fulfillment companies, it offers same-day shipping, manages freight movements, and can even provide expedited delivery service.
Having warehouses around the world has become increasingly important as consumption patterns shift. In the U.S., the consumer market crashed with the economy in 2008. But an interesting thing happened, Schechter says. Instead of the global market going with it, demand simply
