- ShipBob is an e-commerce fulfillment startup that picks and packs orders for online sellers.
- The company has hired Amazon alum, Melissa Nick, as Its first-ever chief supply chain officer.
- Nick told Insider that Amazon executives join logistics startups because they like to build.
ShipBob, an e-commerce fulfillment company backed by Bain Capital Ventures, has nicked its first-ever chief supply chain officer from the prevailing force in e-commerce logistics.
Melissa Nick, who joined the Chicago-based startup Monday, was most recently vice president of North American customer fulfillment for Amazon working from Nashville, Tennessee, where she will remain. Only now, she'll take hold of a different supply chain.
Before joining ShipBob, which picks and packs orders for e-commerce businesses, Nick spent over nine years climbing the ranks at Amazon. She started as a senior operations manager in Los Angeles in 2014 and left the organization in June 2023 after rising to the head of the North American fulfillment operation. She was also a founding team member of Amazon's supply chain for oversized goods like furniture.
She told Insider she decided to join 9-year-old ShipBob when she met the founders and learned the level of service the company sought to provide small and medium online sellers.
"I was excited about some of the customization things that ShipBob offers to merchants," Nick told Insider. Amazon offers one of the fastest fulfillment services out there, but Fulfillment by Amazon is notoriously rigid. Nick said offering customization like branded boxes, marketing inserts, and other more labor-intensive fulfillment services can help set online sellers apart in tighter economic times.
E-commerce sales aren't what they were two years ago, and that means higher stakes for both online sellers and the companies that serve them, like UPS, FedEx, ShipBob, and its competitors. Shopify has exited the logistics game entirely. And less than a year ago ShipBob laid off 7% of its staff, telling employees there was a greater-than-expected downturn in e-commerce volume.
CEO and founder Dhruv Saxena told Insider in October the layoffs were intended to help clear a faster path to profitability. The company has no plans to raise further venture funding, executives told Insider. (Its last $200 million Series E round brought the company's valuation to over $1 billion.)
"This new CSCO role will be incredibly impactful for the future of ShipBob, and I don't know of anyone who has overseen a larger scope than Melissa, heading up North American fulfillment for Amazon and delivering on customer expectations during the most uncertain times due to the pandemic and subsequent years," ShipBob COO and co-founder, Divey Gulati, said in a statement.
ShipBob has combated the come-down from the pandemic online-shipping boom by branching out from just packing boxes. Nick's mandate is to build a wider array of supply-chain services from manufacturer to doorstep — a journey that started in earnest last year when the company teamed up with Flexport. She's going to do that work with a fraction of the warehouses she's used to.
At Amazon, she managed a network of 250 and ShipBob works with roughly 50, some that it operates and many more independent businesses it partners with in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia.
She said getting it right comes down to putting inventory in the right place for the specific customers each seller has.
"You know, not everything needs to have next-day shipping, not everything needs to have two-days shipping. You don't have to have all inventory everywhere," she said.