In the early 1900s, Rick Nelson II’s maternal grandfather, Arturo Corrales, left Cuba and his grandmother, Graciela Lopez, left Spain. By the early 1900s, both had settled in Tampa’s Ybor City to begin new lives in a new land, working in the cigar industry.
That legacy of going forth in search of more prosperous living, adapting to change, serving customers, and bettering their community carries on today with their grandson and our CEO, Rick Nelson.
A maternal third-generation Cuban-American Tampa native, Nelson founded The Fulfillment Lab Inc., in 2012 to serve companies through e-commerce marketing, expedited shipping, order transparency, and packaging customization through fulfillment services.
By 2021, fulfillment service companies will be a $55.6 billion industry worldwide, according to Beroe Inc., a procurement intelligence firm. The industry is dominated internationally by services like Amazon, which includes fulfillment in their shipping. Locally, The Fulfillment Lab also gives entrepreneurs a way to customize their products and ship all orders on the same day.
Where large companies like Amazon may take multiple days just to process and ship, we can get products to the consumer in three days or less and our geographic footprint allows us to deliver in less than three days.This allows customers – particularly businesses – to focus on products and service and leaving The Fulfillment Lab to focus on supply logistics improving the consumer experience.
Additionally, we use data aimed at targeted customers to make and customize packages catered to primary consumers of a certain product. Using Global Fulfillment Software, the marketing data we gather can give insight into the fulfillment process, giving clients a way to customize packaging in a unique way, which in turn, increases their brand awareness and customer loyalty.
Since our founding, we've grown by 100 percent in volume since 2018. That helped lead us to being placed at No. 285 in 2016 on Inc.com’s Top 500 fastest-growing companies and No. 2,612 of Inc.com’s top 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. in 2018.
While we currently have offices in Tampa and Salt Lake City, Utah, in recent months, we began working to open a new office in Rickenbacker, OH, about a half-hour south of Columbus. As a result of our tremendous growth—up to 70 employees and 100 during the peak holiday season—the need to open a second location in the northern United States became both imperative and exciting.
Besides the growth in size and profitability, we plan to add at least more 15 to 20 full time positions to our team over the next 18 months and from 40 to 50 part-time. Some of this staff growth is due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which has increased business opportunities with products such as in Personal Protection Equipment and hand sanitizer.
We are also revved up about our newly launched affiliate program that allows those who know potential future clients to have an automated way to link to introduce clients to services and track who signed on based on referrals, compensating those who gave the referrals, we rely heavily on word of mouth to get business rolling in.
The journey forward looks bright for us—and we hope to have you along for the ride!