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Anthony: Alright, now today in our founder interview series where we talk to amazing founders, I’m talking to Trent from We Are Fulfilment. Trent, tell me about We Are Fulfilment.
Trent: I’m Trent, CEO and Co-founder of We Are Fulfilment. We’ve been in business for about two and a half years, and we’ve got a team of 37 people trying to up the standards of our industry.
Anthony: Amazing! So, tell me, what’s the problem you’re solving?
Trent: The problem we’re trying to solve is a mediocre logistics industry, as it is. So me and Richard. My other co-founder were on the other side of the fence three years ago. We had e-commerce brands and were looking to outsource to a third-party logistics company and we couldn’t find anyone we deemed acceptable to take our business, whether it’s archaic in their technological approach, quite robust and rigid in the way they operate, generally unfriendly, or quite expensive for what we needed.
Anthony: So, this is logistic, this is shipping from China or across town. What’s your typical audience and what are they looking to ship?
Trent: Our partners and customers are generally in the FMCG space, shipping orders mainly in the UK, but also internationally. So really, really simply, we pick, pack, and ship products on behalf of our customers. And the aim, we’re in stage two of our business plan now, is to provide more value to our customers because we’re so intrinsic to their whole operation.
Anthony: So SaaS business, shipping as a service. Alright so, how do you solve this problem? Is it through AI, is it complex logistics, tracking software, is it things that go in trucks? Tell us a bit more.
Trent: How we aim to solve it and up the game of our industry is that there’s very much an arm’s length approach to customers and their third-party logistics company at the moment. And we’re trying to change that.
Our business needs a lot of data from our partners. It needs all of their orders, needs their inventory data for us to do our job. But actually, how can we use all of that to our advantage and therefore our customers’ advantage to give them data-driven insight to improve their business?
So not only that, we’re integrating a lot of third-party apps, Shopify apps, within our own system so we can improve inventory planning and cash flow by offering lending on the value of stock they’ve got in our warehouse, because we know that cash is king and startups and scaleups often struggle with that. A returns portal, all of the things that actually if you just want to hand over the operations department and not just pick, pack and ship, we can take it off your hands.
Anthony: So who’s your typical customer? Is it an Etsy jeweller with three people? Is it a major company doing aeroparts? Tell us about a typical customer and then those watching should go immediately to you.
Trent: So I’d say about 90% of our customers operate on Shopify. Some of them use WooCommerce and other e-commerce platforms, but Shopify is the main one that they all use. A lot of them are based in London, that’s the way the startup and scaleup industry is. But they’re all looking to scale quickly and have a reliable partner.
And the core thing that we’ve got to get right is get their products in the hands of their customers in the way they want it to. But then all the other value-added services is enabling to grow faster, spend faster, increase their bottom line, and essentially grow the business how they want to.
Anthony: Okay, so you said 37 people in the business. That’s amazing! Clearly there’s good traction. Tell us more about the growth.
Trent: We kind of got into it accidentally, me and Richard, being in e-commerce, couldn’t find anything, did it ourselves and then thought, you know, what other people might have an issue with their third-party logistics provider, so let’s give it a go. With no operational background that makes sense!
So year one took us by surprise. We kind of took off, we did £1.3 million in revenue. Year two, we did £3.25 million, and we’re aiming to do about £6.5 million this year.
We did a pre-seed round last year and the money was all invested into a great senior leadership team and our second premises. We brought in experts within the industry who are far better than us, which is what you need to do.
Anthony: Amazing! Thank you so much, Trent. That sounds fabulous.
Trent: Thank you!
