By Riley Kaminer
Are there any private companies that we interact with more regularly than Amazon? Two thirds of Americans are Amazon customers, and the company received 2.72 billion unique monthly visitors in 2023.
But who’s actually powering this eCommerce revolution? To a major extent, it’s individual sellers that put up with Amazon’s stringent policies to access the company’s sea of customers.
MyFBAPrep co-founder and CEO Tom Wicky understands these challenges firsthand. He first started his Amazon journey by selling goods as a side hustle. “I got addicted to the dopamine hit of having an inbox full of orders every morning,” he told Refresh Miami. “But it was very tough for sellers, even back then. You have to play by Amazon’s rules, and they’re getting tighter and tighter.”
One of the biggest barriers to scale: warehousing. Amazon forces sellers to organize products in an individualized, somewhat idiosyncratic way that enables their employees to easily pick the products off the shelves.
The situation is complex for independent warehouses as well. They want Amazon fulfillment business but often do not have the resources to acquire it or the customer service prowess to retain it.
Wicky, alongside co-founders Bart Boughton (COO/CFO) and Taylor Smits (chief supply chain officer), launched MyFBAPrep in 2018 to help alleviate these problems and more. The company’s core activity is offering fulfillment services to Amazon sellers, but they offer a wide range of services including labeling, quality inspection, and returns.
Technology innovation plays a central role in MyFBAPrep’s activities. The company has developed Preptopia, a digital platform that gives sellers deep insights into the status of their inventory at all times. Through Preptopia, users can also seamlessly calculate their profits by consolidating their billing across orders.
Another unique aspect of MyFBAPrep is that it has created a network of more than 100 individual warehouses covering a cumulative 85 million square feet. Customers appreciate that all the warehouses are tied together via MyFBAPrep, with the startup dealing with all aspects of customer service and management. Meanwhile, the platform provides an additional, low-touch revenue stream for warehouses that might otherwise struggle to land such business.
“We’re asset-light and really focused on customer service, which is very novel in this space,” said Wicky, adding that he personally answered the phone for the first two and a half years of the company’s existence (that often resulted in very pleasantly surprised customers on the other end of the phone).
Two of MyFBAPrep’s 15 full-time employees are based in South Florida. Wicky landed at the top of Brickell’s emblematic Icon condo building after decades in Europe and Australia. “When we were moving back, we spent a month in San Francisco and a month in Miami and fell in love with Miami.” A marriage and a few kids later, and Wicky has now settled in Parkland. Before launching MyFBAPrep, some of Wicky’s prior roles included working in strategy at Deutsche Telekom, managing all digital assets of a network of local media companies and yellow pages across Europe, and co-founding Verijet, an AI-powered private airline company.
Despite being bootstrapped, the Financial Times ranked the company as #4 in its list of fastest-growing companies in the US this year, and #1 in Florida. And much more to come, according to Wicky. “We’re in the right space at the right time, and we look forward to continuing to work and grow.”
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
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