Russell (00:08.428)
What's up everybody? Welcome back to the Ecommerce Unlocked podcast where we cut the fluff and we talk about the stuff, right? Where we're talking about e-commerce, actionable strategies and tactics that you can implement in your e-commerce business today. Today's gonna be a fun one. We've got Joe Spisak on the line. He's gonna be talking to us a little bit about three PLs, four PLs, seven PLs, all the PLs. And he's honestly, he's got a really interesting background. So I'm not gonna, I can't do it justice. I'm gonna hand it over to Joe.
Give us just like a quick intro into like your experience, where you come from, your perspective, and then we'll jump off from there.
Joe Spisak (00:45.97)
Yeah, sure thing. And I'm rocking the headphones right now and that intro music just sounded phenomenal in my Apple headphones. You know, I was kind of really bumping feeling that. But yeah, quick intro on me. So currently I am the CEO of fulfill.com, which I founded a little over two years ago. Before that, I started a couple of different e-commerce companies in the tabletop board game space. And then because of...
Emerson (00:52.942)
Thank you.
Russell (00:54.822)
She's just bumping over here. Yeah.
Joe Spisak (01:14.27)
uh, unhappiness with the three PLs I was using while shipping the board games. I ended up starting my own three PL company called ship daddy and sold that a couple of years ago too. So that's kind of how we got to fulfill.
Emerson (01:26.19)
Okay, question on that name, Ship Daddy. That's a fun name. How'd you come up with that? Is there a backstory? Is that like your name on the streets? Like, yo, that's Joe the Ship Daddy out there. How'd that happen?
Joe Spisak (01:32.25)
Thank you.
Joe Spisak (01:35.778)
Yeah, yeah. So there is a backstory to that. And I actually was not the ship daddy. So I started the company and I asked one of my best friends, a guy named Brady Farrell. He just got out of the military just came home from Afghanistan. He was working like a retail job. And I was like, dude, I need help shipping my games. Like, would you want to come work with me? Brady is the most lovable dude in the world. He's got this big bushy beard.
He's a freaking American hero. And so my dad and I, while we were shipping our games out the one day, started calling Brady the Ship Daddy. And the name stuck and we decided to build our entire brand at the company around Brady. So our mascot was this cute short little dude with this big bushy beard. And we thought it was hilarious. So we built our entire brand around him. And it was a hit. Like everybody loved our branding, but that's the story.
Emerson (02:33.262)
That's awesome. What like a flex, that's a good customer, employee, and a great employee story. Like dude, our employee was so good, we named the company after him. That's amazing. That is solid right there. So great work on that. That's cool.
Joe Spisak (02:34.825)
Yeah.
Joe Spisak (02:47.204)
Yeah.
Russell (02:48.328)
And honestly, more personality than any other warehouse out there. I mean, I feel like it's just kind of like an antiquated business, right? Where it's like, I'm JP420 and that's my warehouse name or whatever. You know, it's just like, it's not very interesting. And so I think that brings a cool level of branding. I've looked at the ShipDaddy website and like you've branded it like an actual brand, which is something that, you know, three PLs don't do, which props, like huge, huge shout out.
Joe Spisak (02:49.898)
I'm sorry.
Emerson (02:52.574)
Yeah.
Joe Spisak (03:18.652)
Yeah. Thanks for saying that. And that was one of my main goals when starting ShipDaddy was I wanted to kind of bring some sexiness into the e-commerce fulfillment community, right? Like there's 90% of the logistics companies out there. It's cookie cutter, you know, same pictures. It's just, it's just really not great to look.
Russell (03:36.958)
Mm-hmm.
Joe Spisak (03:38.79)
look at and one of the ways I wanted to kind of differentiate ourselves was through our branding and I think that's just so underutilized in the logistics space in general. It's never a bad option to have a great brand, right?
Emerson (03:50.398)
Amen to that. That's something that I mean, Russ always makes fun of me because I'm always like, dude, supply chain is sexy. Like let's bring sexy back to supply chain. Not so we're bringing sexy back everywhere. But let's make supply chain sexy. And it's been fun. Well, it's been fun and not fun the past couple years since COVID that people actually talking about supply chain. But before it was like this is just this cost center and everyone's like, oh, you actually need supply chain. And if you're coming more like in conversations, it's coming up more that makes it more interesting and engaging to talk to talk about.
Russell (03:50.566)
No, no.
Russell (03:56.764)
No.
Joe Spisak (03:58.396)
Yeah
Okay.
Joe Spisak (04:07.688)
Right.
Joe Spisak (04:19.594)
for sure.
Emerson (04:19.766)
But let's highlight a little bit. I think kind of like your story sounds like kind of leads into what you're doing now of those pain points that you had. So if you're doing your board games, tabletop games and then seeing pain points with your three PLs, I think a lot of brands experienced that. I mean, in my career, working at Nomadic and working with other brands and consulting and whatnot, is a lot of brands go from, I use a three PL,
And then they either want to bring it into self-fulfillment, but then see like, Hey, that's really expensive to bring it in-house by the rack and forklifts or whatever it is. Um, so for you, what are some of those pain points that you're experienced with your three PLs that made you go to do self-fulfillment or do you do self fulfillment and then start the three people at the same time, or was that a different light transition or maybe walking through that process?
Joe Spisak (05:04.442)
Yeah, and you're pretty much exactly right. Like how we got to fulfill was based off of all the previous niche experience that we had in the e-commerce space and in the 3PL and warehousing space. And while I was running my brands, I went through three different 3PLs over the course of a year and a half. And after that, I just put my foot down and I'm like, I'm just going to start shipping for myself because I'm losing money. I can't get ahold of anybody and people aren't hitting our shipping SLAs.
Emerson (05:20.673)
Dang.
Joe Spisak (05:31.366)
And that's the three most important things and what you need with a 3PL, right? Good pricing, people to act as an extension of your business and communicate with you and handle the weird one-offs as they come up periodically. And people that can get your orders out within 24 hours and receive in a reasonable timeline, etc., etc. So we brought that in-house. And while I was looking with my brand, looking for new 3PLs, I, being new to the industries,
Kind of only assume that there were 25, 40, 50 options for good 3PLs out there. When in reality, there's 15,000 plus eCommerce fulfillment centers in the United States alone. So there's lots of really great operators out there. It's just really hard to sift through some of these bigger 3PLs with hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing budgets on a monthly basis when there's lots of good folks.
So that's one of the main reasons we created fulfill was, you know, we offer a free service to brands that lets where we will analyze 500 plus three PLs across 2500 plus three PL locations and narrow it down to the best one to five options for their particular individual scope of works. And that just hasn't existed in our industry up to this point. So
Emerson (06:53.374)
Yeah. Amen to that. I mean, I've been in a similar position where we've worked with multiple three PLs, end up starting our own warehouse slash four PL type of thing, um, for a while, but for you guys, I mean, walk through that, that process of from the brand, what was like your order volume and things like that, and maybe talk about what size you have a unique perspective of being a brand, then doing your own fulfillment and then offering fulfillment services to others. You kind of see that whole picture of like, maybe understanding why orders go, get shipped late, why receiving is longer maybe, or whatnot.
But when do you see like, hey, a brand should start looking at a three PLs at a certain size product type or walk me through that.
Joe Spisak (07:31.226)
Yeah, so good question. At my brand, we were doing a couple thousand orders per month, like 10,000 plus orders per month at our peak. But 85% of our order volume for board games was during Q4, which is the holiday rush, which is when a lot of people are looking to kind of hunker down and play these actual games with their family. So we were in kind of a unique circumstance. But what I will say is, really, any time you start hitting
couple hundred orders per month. I think that is the time you want to start looking for a 3PL. You want to obviously save as many costs as you can early on in your e-commerce brand. But it very quickly hits what I call the graduation point where you're spending 40, 50% of your time packaging everything up, purchasing boxes, driving to USPS, printing these shipping labels.
where it's just not worth your time when you're scaling your brand. You want to be focusing on generating content and creating new product lines and getting new SKUs up and everything that it takes to run and scale and grow a business instead of doing the backend operations, which is why an overwhelmingly high amount of brands end up outsourcing to a 3PL. Just makes sense from a money perspective.
Emerson (08:52.278)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, no that makes sense So you're saying something like probably if your brand hitting more than like three to five hundred orders a month is probably like hey That's when you're starting thinking let's look at a 3pl option Let's move this out of my garage and get it into something more substantial then that's not about accurate
Joe Spisak (09:08.378)
Yeah, it does sound about accurate and it's totally case by case because you can be doing 200 orders per month in your shipping furniture and that is still quality ARR that's going out the door. It really just depends on your brand and depends on what your goals are and it depends on how quickly you envision that you're able to scale this up as well. It used to be that...
There's lots of 3PLs out there that don't have minimum order quantities and still offer really rock solid pricing for smaller brands. People have confused in the past because some bigger 3PLs, they have 500 order minimum order quantities or they have minimum spend of $2,000 per month with us if you're going to be in our 3PL or it's like an Amazon model where we're going to charge you more storage for every month that your inventory is in with us.
that can basically price you out and kind of force you to remove your inventory from the 3PL. But there's like on our network, we have tons of different great boutique level 3PLs that are great operators can give that high touch hands on experience with shipping and delivery and are looking for smaller brands because nobody else in the industry necessarily wants to work with them until they're a little bit more established. So
It's easier to get in with a 3PL earlier and earlier on. You just need to find the right person to partner with.
Emerson (10:34.006)
Makes sense. Yeah, the thing with 3PL that I've recognized too is those smaller ones, they weren't that profit margin they're trying to hit. We've gotten, I've been kicked out of the warehouse because I didn't have enough volume of it and I was pissed because we were there three months and they're like, hey, we got a bigger client. You're out. And like we were doing 8,000 plus orders a month and they're like, yeah, you're still not big enough. I was like, screw this dude. How big do you have to be? And that's when we started around. I was like, I'm tired of bouncing warehouses. And we started our own kind of operations, same process.
Joe Spisak (10:45.159)
Right.
Emerson (11:01.342)
Is there a time you think that either a brand gets so big or a time where they pull back from a 3PL to bring in-house fulfillment or what does that look like? Or is it always like a 3PL, once you're in a 3PL you're kind of stuck in a 3PL world? Or what's your thoughts?
Joe Spisak (11:01.435)
Yeah.
Joe Spisak (11:14.994)
Yeah, I don't think you're necessarily stuck in the 3PL world. I just think that it is a huge undertaking to run your own fulfillment. So to do so, you really have to be invested and have a good reason to want to run your own fulfillment. So these guys actually, I'm wearing this brand called Kill Crew. So they do hundreds of thousands of orders per month. And they
went through three different warehouses and now they have a 30 or 40,000 square foot warehouse and they ship all of their own apparel in-house. You see this more commonly with brands that have a higher level of complexity in their fulfillment and apparel can fit that entire category, right? So if you're doing print on demand and printing your own clothing, if you have a high return in exchange rate,
If you have custom staging and kitting responsibilities, if you wanna add a lot of different intricate promo items or something like that, it can make sense to scale with your own fulfillment or potentially bring it in-house. But again, I'll come back to the point of there's lots of flexible fulfillment options out there. And if you don't necessarily have to scale it yourself and you can...
spend your time and energy focusing on other things in your business. It's just one less thing that you have to take care of. You may be able to see, it's a cost benefit analysis. You may be able to save a couple percentage points by doing it yourself and setting it all up. But how much more money could you make saving that time that you're spending building that out on more marketing initiatives or adding skews in, et cetera, et cetera.
Russell (13:00.undefined)
This is something that I personally struggle with in my entrepreneurial journey. I've started and worked with nine e-commerce brands or more, consulted with quite a few more. And when I started brand, I typically do the wrong thing of like, I'll just do everything. Like I'll do the website, I'll do the marketing, I'll do the ads, I'll do this fulfillment, I'll do it all. So with my latest venture, I'm like, okay, I know I can't do that. So I'm hiring an ads guy, I'm hiring a social media.
person to be able to handle those things for me. And so I'm kind of in this mindset of like, I'm still really small. I'm still doing my own fulfillment just because, so it's actually a brand that I purchased. We've got like 500 active SKUs and not a ton of orders. So it's kind of like, it's really complex with, and nothing's barcoded, nothing's got actual SKUs. So you kind of have to know the product. So I'm kind of in this weird situation where like, I need to sell through this hundreds of thousands of dollars
Joe Spisak (13:44.126)
Yeah.
Russell (13:58.128)
old inventory that now is not worth what it should be. And so I'm in this weird situation. However, if I'm a brand and I'm coming to you, we can kind of take my situation as maybe a use case. And I say, hey, I need to find a warehouse that can handle me and my situation. What are like the things that you talk with brands about? Or like, what are the data points that you bring in that make it so that you can make a good match with somebody within your network?
Joe Spisak (14:25.37)
Yeah, and you are a really great example because that is a brand that would be tough for 98% of 3PLs to bring on. You're still, you know, haven't hit super high monthly volume metrics and you have a really high skew count. And then the cherry on top is that the skews aren't barcoded yet, right? So and you're not going to spend money to go back and.
and re barcode everything and kind of go through those processes where with your currently as a brand. So like your best case scenario would be to try and sell through that. And then while you're replenishing inventory, work directly with your manufacturers to get your individual skews barcoded. And then once you do that, you would be at the point where you would be ready to start looking for a three PL. They would just have to be apparel specific and be able to.
take on customers that weren't doing a 10 to one order to skew ratio, which is where we see a lot of 3PLs kind of like their sweet spot of customers they're trying to take on. So there's definitely folks out there that would work with you. You just want to get barcoded figured out before that. But to come back to answer your question, kind of what data points are we looking at whenever we are using our matchmaking algorithm and our matchmaking team? What are they using to kind of narrow down from our bigger pool of 3PLs?
to find our top five for a particular scope of work. And there's lots of different data points, but monthly order volume, skew count, vertical that you're selling in. So apparel, electronics, hazmat, cold storage, big and bulky, preferred geography, which typically usually coincides on what port your inventory is coming in from, because we kind of run a cost benefit analysis on.
how expensive is it going to be to have storage close to that port versus how much is it going to cost to freight that to a more inland 3PL. That's going to have better storage costs, but obviously you're going to add in higher freight costs. So those are just some of the categories right there, but we start to look at how custom your fulfillment solution needs to be, and then that helps us narrow down to 3PLs that have more...
Joe Spisak (16:46.558)
high touch communicative approaches and stuff as well. So that's just a couple of them, but a lot more.
Russell (16:51.144)
Okay, so I'm also kind of curious, what's your vetting criteria for adding a...
Russell (17:19.848)
a warehouse or a 3PL into your network. So it sounds like you have hundreds already, but like, are you kind of sifting through these and saying, yeah, you fit, you don't, or what does that process look like for you guys?
Joe Spisak (17:31.514)
Yeah, that's a really good question. And so we go through a whole interview process with every 3PL that joins our network. And part of that process is having them form submit to us lots of different information about their warehouse, about their capabilities, about their ideal customer profile, about current customers that they're shipping for, who they've had a lot of success with in the past, who their ideal customer profile is. And, um, we
That's a big part of our vetting process. And once we get a brand signed with a 3PL, we keep our eye on that brand and have periodic communication with them just to make sure the 3PL is doing everything that they said that they could. And that has worked out really, really well for us. We've matched hundreds and hundreds of brands in 2023. And we had made...
under a five turn last year out of hundreds and hundreds of brands. And there is a 38% year over year turnover rate with brands looking for new 3PLs in general. So we're like massively crushing those numbers with happy customers. And then in the future, we'll look to tie directly into the warehouse management systems of our 3PLs so we can kind of add this quantitative data driven approach to things as well, which were.
we're already kind of beta testing out right now.
Emerson (19:00.098)
That's sweet. That's awesome. Cause I think what you're, you're talking about before is, um, with Russell's situation, like, Hey, you're an apparel brand. Let's put you with a warehouse that does apparel. I think a lot of brands are in there searching for their own three PL. I think a three PL is like their, their normal reaction is like, Hey, we could fulfill anything and we'll do anything and that's usually like a red flag now that I've kind of learned is like, Oh, a three PL that's going to do any type of product isn't necessarily niche in a certain category may not be the right fit.
Russell (19:00.744)
And with that, that's huge.
Joe Spisak (19:19.835)
Exactly.
Emerson (19:30.114)
for a certain brand or whatnot because there's different like SLAs different like weights of handling that product That's where we got into some issues as well for us when we were with our Brand and they had a lot of returns that had a higher inspection point that needed to happen And so they were saying hey, we're receiving all these pallets of return inventory back in the inventory and stock They just didn't inspect anything We had like a couple hundred pallets in a stowaway spot not inspected properly or whatnot and it was causing some major issues But that wasn't there for it. That wasn't there at their niche. That wasn't what they're doing
like SLAs and stuff weren't being met. Cause I just like outside their scope. They didn't have time for that or whatever. So I think that's definitely like a big reason why a lot of these brands churn from their three PLs is cause yeah, they're not looking at the whole picture. Understand there is like specific niches. And I also think it's like a disservice on the three PL side when they're just trying to get business, trying to get revenue saying they can do things they can't or can't support. Um, that's where the churn happens. Right. So that's a huge, uh, huge thing that gets overlooked, um, on the three PL side and on the brand side of, of picking out the right partner.
Russell (20:29.321)
And moving a warehouse sucks. Like that's not fun. So that's a crazy metric that you showed. What was it, 36% churn or 38?
Joe Spisak (20:32.383)
sucks.
Emerson (20:33.453)
It's expensive.
Joe Spisak (20:38.686)
38% Shopify released it in one of their e-commerce logistics annual reports, probably two or three years back. I'll have to dig it up and send you guys the article. But I saw that like right before we started fulfill. And I was like, all right, this is my sign. Like we need to be helping people out here because moving warehouse absolutely sucks. And if it's this high, like I want to be helping people, you know, find the right partner. So.
Russell (20:54.678)
Yeah.
Russell (21:06.74)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean and not even to mention the switching cost of moving warehouses like that's if you're taking You know the ideal is you sell out of all your inventory in one warehouse and you load it up in another and you don't Have to take any you know containers back and forth, but that's a perfect world that doesn't exist. So Yeah, so that's impressive
Emerson (21:28.47)
On that note of the three PLs, the churn rate, what are some things that either do you think that a brand maybe doesn't do as well that influences that churn or that dissatisfaction? Like how does a brand or three PL manage that relationship better, do you think?
Joe Spisak (21:43.974)
Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think a lot of it goes into just transparency during the actual search for your three PLs and trying to find the right partner, right? I think people go in with expectations from the brand side of the house and think that their three PL is going to be doing this, that, or the other. And then when it comes to actually delivering on that from an operational perspective,
When that doesn't happen, the brand's all up in arms because just expectations weren't necessarily aligned. But I think a lot of that can be solved by finding the right person through the actual matchmaking process. And that's why it comes back to what we were talking about earlier. A major green flag when searching for a 3PL is, have they shipped for a brand very similar to yours in the past? Do they actively ship successfully for brands?
that look like you guys. And if they do, then that tells a really good story. And that's one of the main things that you can look for when talking to 3PLs is, hey, let me talk to a couple of brands that look very similar to me that you currently ship for. Boom. You'll be able to make so many assumptions from that, right? They probably have really good parcel rates for the weight and dimension of what you're shipping at. They probably share your returns processes and can mimic something.
similar to what you'll require at your brand. They probably ship really well across sales channels that you guys are selling on since you're selling on similar products, et cetera, et cetera. The list kind of goes on and on. So, yeah.
Emerson (23:27.466)
Yeah, I think that was one thing during my career that I think I've, I've lacked a lot on was that communication or transparency with the, the warehouse. A lot of times, uh, it's like, Hey, Black Friday is coming up. You just assume the warehouse is going to staff up, but like providing forecasts and things like that to the warehouse has helped them like, Hey, we have X amount orders going out. The sales coming up. Even if it's not Black Friday, you have like a summer sale. You're going to do communicating that a lot of brands I think are just like, Hey, the warehouse should just know what I'm doing. They should be able to get X amount of orders out no matter what every day. Um,
If this like one off occasion was back, they don't know why that customer is shipping stuff back, creating transparency of like your returns process. What are your main like SLAs? What's your SOP on, on processing these returns? I know I made that error a lot. I was like, when this item comes back, of course, the warehouse is going to expect it and make sure they check all these pockets and all this stuff to make sure stuff's not coming back. We have plenty of instances where people are shipping their bags back with stuff still inside the pockets. They put it back as new inventory.
but there was like hundreds of pockets in these bags. They wouldn't know every bag like pocket to check and whatnot. So there is still like a lot of training. I think there's like a misconception where it's like the three PL just knows what to do. Like this is where it is. And a three PL, I mean, I'm sure you experienced that the same, like the churn rate of a warehouse worker is insane. I feel like in general, it's not like the one employee, you're not working 20 years in a warehouse. Typically it's a couple of months lucky if you get them for a couple of years, I feel. And so that churn and them having to get like used to that.
Joe Spisak (24:47.784)
Yeah.
Emerson (24:50.338)
product and whatnot you really have to have good documentation and make sure you're aware how well to make sure
Joe Spisak (24:53.638)
sure. Yeah, you're spot on. And that's one of the many reasons we're super bullish on working with three PLs that have real time communication with their customers, where they have a dedicated person that they can reach out to at any time. And on top of that, the person is actually in the warehouse and on the warehouse floor. That is where three PLs truly act as an extension to your brand. And you're not
Submitting an email support ticket waiting 72 hours getting triage down the chain and saying a prayer that your problem is going to get Fixed under two weeks like that is an absolute nightmare When it when you know you're working with a 3p L that has that level of support, but you know The whole goal is not to have to talk to your 3p L at all So if you can have that real-time support you can just let them know when
You have a big sale coming up or you're going to be adding in a couple of new skews or something inevitably goes wrong in the e-commerce world. So you have that level of accessibility, but you don't have to use it.
Emerson (26:04.278)
Yeah, I agree. I'm very bullish, probably more on the like the boutique fulfillment side of stuff, the mom and pop shops. Because those like you said, like those bigger enterprise, three PLs I've worked with before, they've gone through so such heavy like acquisition and in general, I feel to get to like be an enterprise fulfillment that the tech doesn't work well together. So even though they're like a three PL, they're acting more as a four PL through acquisition. Like we had a warehouse who had like an OMS but didn't line up perfectly with the WMS.
And so I'd say like, Hey, at 100 units in stock, like actually have zero units because our WMS like, Oh, well, that doesn't sync up. And like, how would I know that? Like what you're displaying here doesn't actually mean that and whatnot. Um, and those mom pops, I think if you can get good tech to work with, like if you're doing like a multi-channel fulfillment, which I'm not sure you're taking, I'm not a huge fan of multifillment, like multi-location fulfillment. Like for most brands, I think they jump into it too early where they're like, don't necessarily need to do that. Like just negotiate better shipping rates for the time being until you're doing.
Joe Spisak (26:41.414)
Right. Yeah.
Emerson (27:02.07)
tens of thousands of orders a month, most likely, unless you're doing a bigger product or whatever. I think it sounds sexy to have multiple locations when you probably don't need them with the right fulfillment partner. Anyways, that was my tangent. But basically, I think that these smaller boutique shops that you can't have that the same person picking your order or someone that's like dedicated in that warehouse to go fix that problem is huge. Cause I've been down that rabbit hole forever. Where it's like, where's this issue? Someone in...
in New York is talking to a person in Texas to tell the person over in, I don't know, in California to pick the order. And I'm like, dude, that went through way too many people just to figure out where this order was. And it just gets lost in translation. That's where everyone gets pissed off. And that's where you get these bad, bad reps from three people else.
Russell (27:44.536)
On that note, hopefully it's not a tricky question, but which WMSs are you a fan of? There are so many out there, and honestly I've seen too many warehouses say, oh, you know, all of them suck, we're gonna make our own. And so I've seen some like homegrown, I've seen some bigger ones, but then, you know, I'm curious, which ones have you?
Emerson (27:50.38)
Yeah.
Russell (28:07.368)
Seen like work really well that you kind of recommend if a warehouse was like, hey dude, what do you what do you think? As far as like we're making a switch. What would you record?
Joe Spisak (28:15.41)
Yeah, so a lot goes into that, depends necessarily what you're looking for, what you're fulfilling, et cetera, et cetera. But generally speaking, an e-commerce fulfillment, a good mix between kind of bank for your buck, best in class tech, good longevity to scale your business on. You can think Shapiro, Pacquiao, Lodgawa. Luminous is a good cheaper option.
Um, that's kind of up and coming as well. Um, DePasco is a good kind of upper mid market option. Um, and those are kind of the main five players in the U S, um, uh, three PL central is a big name. They're now extensive. Um, they have very mixed reviews. Like they're a popular option, but not necessarily like a super great option just from based off the feedback that.
we've gotten from 3PLs on our network, but they have other pros that some of the WMSs that I just named don't offer as well. So there's pros and cons with any different one of those WMSs that you use, that you could scale a very successful 3PL with any one of those options. But the tech has gotten so, so much better within the course of the last five to seven years.
Whenever I started my 3PL, there was only a handful of options and we were one of Shiphero's very first customers. Like the Shiphero product that we were originally starting with versus what they can offer now is wildly different. So it's become easier and easier to start up your own commercial grade e-commerce fulfillment warehousing company than it ever has been.
Emerson (30:07.818)
That ship hero business strategy I thought was so interesting when they're like, Hey, we do fulfillment and now user our WMS. I thought that was genius. Honestly, I was like, okay, that's there. There hasn't been a great WMS in that feature. That's a very customer friendly. I feel like most of them are very archaic. They're very legacy feeling. At least it's I do with this built like on Microsoft 95 or windows 95 or whatever. I was like, this is like very boxy and all that stuff. So that was like the, I was gonna have to have them one of the more like
Sexy WMS as I've seen come out that's like oh this is like has a good UI to it user interface and things like that So that's I mean start to hear about Yeah, no, it's been it's been fun working with them. Yeah same thing with luminous. I'm excited I'm very bullish on what they're up to As a whole with e-commerce those are fun once I'm familiar with as well But job like this has been so fun. I love this geeking out and I could do this like all day just going down all the niches all the
Joe Spisak (30:41.326)
Yeah, yeah, they have a great overall brand too.
Emerson (31:02.89)
This stuff of fulfillment. This is like what I get hyped about where everyone else is like, if you turn down the radio, I'm like, dude, turn up. Let's let's talk more about all the intricacies of fulfillment. It's such a fun, interesting and diverse like industry. So thanks so much for jumping on and sharing some of our insights of your insights with us. For people to learn more about fulfill.com and what you guys are doing, what's a good place for them to reach out to you and connect and things like that.
Joe Spisak (31:27.202)
Yeah, so I'm pretty active on LinkedIn and Twitter. So my name is Joe Spizak. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn. At Joe Spizy is my Twitter account. And then fulfill.com, F-U-L-F-I-L-L.com is our website. You know, we're very responsive, love to talk shop. So if you have any questions or, you know, want to partner up somewhere, you know, never hesitate to reach out.
Emerson (31:51.394)
Perfect. Awesome. Well, Joe, thanks again. We'll love to have you back here again and geek out a bit more in the future.
Joe Spisak (31:57.447)
Yeah, thanks a lot, guys.
Russell (31:58.805)
Thanks, Joe