We were using Mail Order Manager (M.O.M.) as our OMS and WMS. M.O.M. was something like $100 off the shelf at CompUSA, as I recall. “Mail Order” Manager because at this point, direct to consumer fulfillment was primarily mail-order catalog fulfillment. Despair’s e-commerce platform was Yahoo Store, and it was cutting edge. Yahoo Store had a M.O.M. formatted export, and we would export from Yahoo and import the orders into M.O.M.

PDS had been Despair’s 3PL in Dallas. Parcel fulfillment was not their main business – most everything they were doing was pallet-based. They were happy to support us as we got our fledging 3PL off the ground, and they shared their M.O.M. configurations with us and provided us some guidance as we transitioned the Despair account from them to us.

We started fulfilling Despair’s orders in September 2001. In to fulfillment, we also took over Despair’s customer service. Part of that included building out a call center of sorts. Dave Wiggins was on hand to punch all of the needed phone wires to make that work.

There are things that I’m good at and things that I’m not so good at. Translating Greek – not so good. Customer Service – not so good. I would feel each caller or emailer’s problem(s) deeply and get stuck trying to solve nonsense that wasn’t mine to solve. With the help of a beer, I was lamenting all of this one night over off Speedway at the house of some college friends, Judson Sutherland and Cam Houser. “Oh, I’ll do that stuff,” Cam said. So Cam came on and took over customer service – employee three.