Analogistical

Concept and percept within the context of third party logistics. Showing my work.

  • Origin Story – 3

    Of all of us on day one, I brought the operational experience to Amplifier. You see, after my freshman year of college, I had spent the summer working at Hydraulic Supply Company in South Florida [the location off the Sawgrass Expressway]. I specialized in packing hoses, pumps, fittings, and other hydraulic supplies. When it came time to make a box and put an order’s contents into the box, I made the box and put the contents of a bin into said box. I then sent it along the line to be scanned, labeled, and closed. On the one hand, I don’t remember the specifics. On the other hand, there were not a lot of specifics.

    So, when we decided at Amplifier that we were ready to start doing things with stuff, I was like, “we need to get a pallet jack.” In retrospect, the correct order of operations is 1. get a warehouse 2. get a pallet jack. But, as I mentioned last post, Gibson had a set of double doors that could accommodate a pallet and a big room on the first floor, so who needs a warehouse. I didn’t know how one went about getting a pallet jack, so I poked around on WebCrawler and came across the phrase “Materials Handling”, and that was the jackpot. Once I learned the industry term, I found Global Industrial and ordered a pallet jack. And it came with a catalog that had everything I could think of that might belong in a warehouse, and hundreds of pages of additional stuff I’d never before considered.

    It was a narrow pallet jack. I have no recollection why I ordered a narrow pallet jack. My best guess is that I measured the standard doorway at Gibson and got a jack that would fit those doors. Unfortunately, the pallets weren’t correspondingly narrow, so our pallet storage was limited to the big room.  The big room was maybe the size of a McDonald’s dining room with a hallway and smaller rooms wrapping around it. On the second floor where we had some offices and the call center we were setting up. It was coming together.

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  • Origin Story – 2

    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.

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  • Origin Story – 1

    Most people don’t know what a degree in Classics is. Those that do often presume that it equips you mainly to teach Greek and/or Latin. Unfortunately, I was not a great student of Greek or Latin and had no business teaching either. And you know the saying, “those that can’t teach, do logistics.”

    We started Amplifier (doing business as Copernica, originally) back in January 2001. Jef Sewell and Joel Bush were our founders, Jud Harris was the first employee and I was the second, whatever that means. Our first office was an apartment at Post West Ave, behind the Office Depot at 5th and Lamar in Austin. Our first client was Two Birds Film, and we would ship the Two Birds DVDs and VHS tapes at the Post Office over at Guadalupe and 6th.

    Steve Mattingly and Scott Flack helped us secure our next space – “Gibson” – a two story building adjacent to the railroad tracks at the bottom of Gibson St off South Lamar. (Prior, the building had been used for testing concrete, I think.)  Having a building with a dock – of sorts- and a proper, pallet-allowing set of double doors, we were ready to take our 3PL to the next level, and Despair, Inc moved their e-commerce fulfillment from a Dallas shop to us in September of 2001.

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