

“Our customers now include companies in consumer electronics, robotics, and 3D printing along with larger e-commerce businesses that each import hundreds of millions in goods.” He adds new technologies are well-represented in their client base: It’s hard enough to build a brand, design a product, get an audience and manufacture at scale without spending all your energy worrying about the products getting from the factory to the people.” “We have eight publicly traded companies using us now and over 600 companies as customers. Petersen explains that they also provide support to start-ups as well as big businesses – clients that traditional freight forwarders weren’t usually willing to provide competitive rates and adequate attention because they focused on serving older, more established companies: That is what makes us really competitive.” “We’re enabling some of the world’s best engineers and logistics people to work together.
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He says they differentiate themselves from the traditional industry via a combination of software and transportation: In 2015, Flexport announced that they had raised $6.9 million in seed funding from investors – including First Round Capital, Google Ventures, Bloomberg BETA, and Y Combinator. Since their beginning, they have grown from a small start-up to a firm of over 100 people, including sales and customer service staff in Amsterdam and Hong Kong and engineers in San Francisco – not to mention a big team of customs brokers.

Shipment details from Flexport’s appįlexport has grown its revenue 25% monthly every month since November 2013, and the tech industry has taken notice.
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Flexport offers a full suite of managed importing services, providing a dedicated account management team as well as access to custom brokerage services and competitive freight rates. The traditional means of managing a company’s global freight shipments is replaced with a simple online app that allows the customer to request and book shipments, track all global freight movements in real time, manage product data, visual their supply chain, view analytics and more – all in real time. The company is considered a true disruptor of the freight forwarding industry. Several years later after launching three successful businesses, learning five languages and spending a stint as a classmate of Y Combinator’s class of 2014, Flexport was born. Yet it’s an industry that relies on very antiquated ways of doing business – and as a user I just thought, wow, it shouldn’t have to be this hard.” “Freight is shipments over 150kg, (so) it can’t can’t go through the parcel network, it won’t go down the conveyor belt and in the world of importing its going to change hands five, six, seven times until it gets to the customer. He says the hardest part they experienced was freight, in particular with the paperwork: Petersen’s background in importing includes working in business with his brother to buy products in China and selling them to consumers in the US. Ryan Petersen, CEO and founder of Flexport. I spoke to Ryan Petersen, CEO and founder of Flexport, who explained the traditional freight forwarding process is compounded by importers and exporters having to manage the entire process by telephone, email, fax, or courier. Usually, freight forwarding is an industry where global supply chains are clouded by lack of visibility, confusing paperwork, complicated regulations, rampant price discrimination, and unpredictable delays. Cypher reminded me that while it’s easy to do your shopping online, it still only accounts for a small amount of all retail sales.Technology is disrupting traditional industries from printing to manufacturing – and now you can add freight forwarding to that list. Oak has creating the Oak Mirror, a connected device that turns the bricks-and-mortar retail experience into one that is closer in reality to what we have come accustomed to online.
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In times where retail fashion can be bought in seconds and free returns mean that your apartment can be an at-home changing room, I was interested to talk last week to Healy Cypher, co-founder and CEO of Oak and creator of a hardware enabled platform that uses mirrors as a conduit to transform the retail experience. We can shop on the internet anywhere, and at any time, without a physical cash transaction and have it delivered to us in what can feel like the blink of an eye. It’s plain to see that emerging technology has changed the retail experience beyond recognition.

This article was written by Cate Lawrence for readwrite
