Startup Positioned to Win Every Pitch
Boxed Wholesale is a startup that delivers bulk-size groceries and household products directly to consumers. Boxed customers order at Boxed.com or on the free Boxed app and pay no membership fee. In two years, Boxed has grown from its CEO’s garage to three warehouses across the U.S. Millions of people have used the app and the company has raised $33 million in venture funding.
Kelly Sickles leads the Finance team at Boxed, where every employee – including the CEO – takes shifts in the warehouse. Boxed puts an emphasis on learning and its employees rely on a broad range of resources, including investors, business partners, and personal mentors and connections. They also use one-on-one learning with GLG experts to get smart about best practices and strategies among other wholesalers, e-commerce companies, and grocers. They talk to experts in the course of new product launches and market overviews – and also to prep for pitch meetings with potential suppliers. A deep understanding of their suppliers’ needs gives Boxed instant credibility.
Transcript
I’m Kelly Sickles. I’m the Director of Finance at Boxed Wholesale.
We provide products that people use every day in bulk sizes and deliver them to their doorsteps.
I started my career on Wall Street. And my favorite part of that was working with entrepreneurial companies.
Everybody, from the CEO to our employee’s that are just starting off, all take shifts in the warehouse.
We keep the spirit of a start-up, but we are putting in the foundation to build a very scalable business.
The growth has been incredible. Two years ago we started out of our CEO’s garage and today we’re in three warehouses across the country.
We’re fortunate to have a lot of resources available to us, especially since we live and work in New York City. Some of those resources include our professional networks, our investors, business mentors.
We’re also very fortunate to have GLG as a resource.
When we had first started off, nobody had heard of Boxed Wholesale. We were small and, frankly, it was hard to get credibility when we walked into a room. And having access to experts, people that understand what we’re trying to do with limited resources, on a much faster timeline, helped us get up to speed and understand our suppliers’ needs, which really helped us kick off strong relationships a lot faster.
There’s an enormous amount of resources available today, from the Internet from blogs, from white papers and books, but really having a conversation with somebody who’s been in the trenches and faced the same challenges that we have has been tremendously helpful.
Boxed has an amazing future ahead of us. We are on an incredibly fast trajectory.
We hope we get to work with GLG as well, for a long time.
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