Michael and Matthew’s first experience with fulfillment began with a product business that Michael started on Amazon.com. Using the Amazon offered FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon), they had both their Amazon.com sales and their website sales fulfilled (picked, packed and shipped to the customer).
To those that are familiar with FBA, you’re aware of its simplicity, but you’re also aware of the struggle for brand growth (they do not allow you to use personally branded packaging), not to mention the prices weren’t cheap.
At this point, they figured they’d try their luck with getting their own 3PL. Michael had heard from Ezra Firestone of a 3PL that did fulfillment for his companies. They trusted him, so they went for it.
Very soon after that, they brought their next shipment into the 3PL and quickly found out they were getting attacked by fees. Like, literally destroyed. They were the pray, and the 3PL were the hunters. You get the picture. Matthew and Michael kept having to go back to their contract and dig through the fine print to find all of the random fees they agreed to. The only thing that contract did was justify the 3PLs right to take all their money.
Not to mention, when they had incorrect shipments or when their customers’ shipments got lost, it was really difficult to get sorted out. Often, it took days to resolve and was a total inconvenience. The whole process was messy and they were left feeling unimportant. To the credit of the 3PL, they did their best to take care of them within their massive system. But let’s be real, a massive system usually never shows much care for the little guy.
After much frustration and loss of money, they decided to bring their fulfillment in-house. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a house to bring fulfillment into. So, they went searching. By a miracle, they found and purchased a $1.1M warehouse.
That’s when they brought Darrell in. Very quickly they found that it was more profitable, flexible, and scalable. They created their own pond and were able to be as big as they wanted to be.
Early on, Darrell realized that there was a huge need for the service of fulfillment. Michael and Matthew would talk all the time about all the problems they had and the solutions that bringing everything in-house brought. Darrell began to think, “There have to be business’ owners throughout the entire country who were dealing with the same exact problems Matthew and Michael were.” To put it simply: many e-commerce companies are being treated like the tiny fish in a vast ocean. Who likes that? Only fish trapped in an aquarium, that’s who.
The three amigos got together and decided that they wanted to give the same experience to other companies that they had created for themselves. They wanted other businesses to have the same profitability, flexibility, and scalability that they were now experiencing. Ultimately, they wanted to create a company that would be instrumental in helping other companies grow. And thus, Ship Steezy was born. The name was chosen, the simplest of all simple pay structures manifested, and the grind of sharing our vision became an aggressive reality.