What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Juan Maisel, who is the founder and CEO of Grip Shipping. Juan, before this, was one of the early team members and head of logistics at Butcherbox, where he was responsible for building out the infrastructure and the way to ship a bunch of perishable goods to all over the US. And now he's kind of doing that with grip shipping. So, Juan, I'm going to let you kick us off. I know we're excited for this convo because you guys have already processed over a billion dollars worth of goods through your platform. You've built out this whole technical infrastructure to handle perishables, and it's a concept that we haven't really gotten into on DTC pod. So really excited for this convo. Why don't you kick us off, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and anything I may have missed.

Yeah, of course.

Thank you for having me here. Excited to be with you guys here. So, as you were saying, part of the very early team at Butcherbox, basically when we were trying to figure out how to ship and sell a box of frozen meat online. And you guys know the story, but that company scaled pretty fast, very successfully bootstrapped since day one, so never really raised a dollar from external investors, which meant basically profitable since day one. And what we're doing at grip is all those learnings of, hey, how do I ship a box of frozen or.

Perishable something in the mail and make money while doing it all across the country?

So all those learnings that we got from that, we created this platform that.

Dynamically decides what's the best way to.

Get the box to your customer, always on a per box basis. So it's very different than shipping non perishable stuff, because the non perishable stuff.

You put it on the mail.

And as long as you're notifying your customers, like most of them are fine with it. Some items, of course, require some urgency and you need to get to them very fast. And you still need to measure your metrics and understand how you're getting to your customer. But it's not really crucial to get.

There on a specific time, right?

Because order a t shirt and you want it for a party and you miss a delivery date, you're pretty sad about it, but you can still wear it. You'll wear it for your next week.

Or next party or whatever it is. But if you order a box of.

Meat and it doesn't show up in time, then that means that you open.

A box it's bloody.

And you were supposed to be feeding your family with that, or having some type of party with that, and you just have to throw it away. So the requirements and specifications and complexities of it are definitely much harder than that. So as you were saying, we launched a couple of years ago, we've now processed over a billion dollars worth of goods through our platform. And then we recently announced the launch.

Of our fulfillment services as well, which.

Means that our customers now basically use us as the end to end provider.

So in practice, what that means is.

They sell their product through Shopify or whatever point of sale system they have.

As soon as they get the order.

It drops into our system. And then we handle that dynamic decision.

Making of how to ship it, and.

Then we actually ship it for them as well. So that way they can focus on what they do best, which is creating amazing products, building brands, selling online, marketing.

The products, and we just handle all the back end of that.

Sweet.

You actually were a butcher box. So were in the arena, you went through the testing field of order, like high order volume, learning through the experience of everything that could possibly go wrong. And a lot of things that can go wrong with shipping perishable goods are oftentimes things that are completely out of your control, such as natural events, like there's a huge heat wave in Arizona and the box was sitting there at the airport for a really long time and you have no control over that. So I'm curious about the trials and tribulations and the things you went through at butcherbox to learn how to minimize the sort of margin of mistakes of things that could go wrong. When shipping perishable goods, you have some stories of what you learned there.

So shipping perishable goods, it's a fast way to get a lot of gray hair. It's a fast track towards that.

We're trying for it not to be that way anymore, but that's how it.

Has been for the last decade.

And there's a lot of stories around it. I mean, even like super early on at our days at Butcherbox, where we noticed that for some reason we shipped more than one product or like one box to some customers in the Boston area. And what a regular d two C company would do is just text them and offer for them to ship it.

Back or just keep it and they'll.