We built the software we always wanted.

From a desk to a warehouse

In 2010, Ryan and Luke started a DTC brand. A DTC brand sells straight to customers online, with no store in the middle. At first, our small team packed every order. We taped the boxes at a desk, printed the labels and got them out the door.

Then the brand took off. Orders piled up faster than our small team could pack them. We had a choice. Keep doing it all ourselves, or hand shipping to someone else and focus on the brand.

We chose a large 3PL, a company that stores, packs and ships orders for other brands. For a while, it worked. Orders went out. We didn't have to hire a warehouse team or lease space. Our brands kept growing.

But the bigger we got, the worse it felt. The bills got longer and harder to read. We couldn't see our orders or our stock in real time. We were a small account in a very big building.

Then a code change on their side sent a huge batch of our orders by next-day air instead of our normal service. Their billing ran so far behind that we didn't see it for weeks. By then, the damage was done. That scared us. We knew we had to take our stock, and our future, back into our own hands.

While we looked for warehouse space, we met Jon. He'd spent 20 years at UPS working on carrier rates and contracts. He asked a simple question. Why not ship for other brands too?

In 2014, Ryan, Matt, Luke and Jon started our own 3PL. Our brands were the first customer.

That's when the software problem got real.

A 3PL runs on software, and no single product did the whole job. We needed one tool to pull orders in from the stores. Another to run the warehouse. Another to buy labels and close out each day's shipments. Then EDI connections for the big retailers, a desktop shipping app and more. Most days, about five tools were running at once.

None of them stuck. In twelve years, we're on our third WMS, the system that runs the warehouse floor. We've used six different shipping and manifest programs.

All of it was expensive. We ran lean, and it still cost a lot every month. Warehouses our size can spend far more. The money wasn't even the worst part. The tools were clunky and slow. They didn't talk to each other, so we built shaky bridges between them. When a bridge broke, orders stalled, and someone stayed late fixing software instead of shipping boxes.

So in 2023, we started building the fix ourselves.

That's ShipGenius. It's one platform that does the work of all those tools, built by people who've packed the boxes and run the floor. It's the software we needed on that first desk, and the software we needed when we ran the warehouse.

ShipGenius is based in Kaysville, Utah.