A Canadian third-party logistics company that recently expanded into the U.S. has big goals to improve the American supply chain and to do so sustainably by reaching 12.75 million households with electric vehicles.
The company will forward place product on a just-in-time basis to ensure it gets to the customer in a timeframe that meets their expectations. What that looks like is a sofa stored in Houston gets forward placed the minute the order is received from a shopper living in New York, who then receives real-time tracking throughout shipment and can select a delivery date and time that works for them.
That’s the goal for Toronto-based tech-enabled fulfillment and logistics company GoBolt, which has made its first foray into the U.S. with a headquarters in New Jersey. The company is also operational in Los Angeles, while working on opening operations in Houston and Miami with Dallas, Austin and Atlanta to follow.
Mark Ang, GoBolt co-founder and CEO, said the goal is to eventually be in every major city in every U.S. state.
“That gets bigger and better exponentially if we have more nodes in the network lit up because what we're finding is that we're doing such a good job in the markets that we do serve that our merchants want us in all the other markets that they're in,” Ang said. “It's all about … which market make the most sense for our merchants, their shopper and for GoBolt. That's kind of what we're doing in the background, but the network gets exponentially better as you add more nodes into it because those nodes turn on as available last-mile hubs, which you can connect other fulfillment centers to. That's how we think about the network getting better over time, and it's one that we want to operate first party so that the quality level maintains.”
GoBolt has already been supporting U.S. and international brands with its services in Canada, and Ang said the expansion comes as an answer to those brands’ call for the company to replicate its model in the U.S. GoBolt’s U.S. network was based around those brands’ needed services, but there is ripe opportunity for further growth in the market, he said, as there are many single-point models in the U.S. that offer warehousing, fulfillment, freight, last-mile delivery and more, but not as many that provide all of those services under one company.
Popular retailer American Eagle purchased third-party logistics company Quiet Logistics and delivery startup AirTerra last year as part of its goal to transform its supply chain, saying a reliable and consistent in-market fulfillment network is vital in today’s marketplace. Ang said those transactions are telling of how America’s fulfillment space and supply chain is broken as companies are unable to find a reliable, quality 3PL partner to fulfill their needs.
