It has attracted about 26,000 end users worldwide, says Simmons, president and CEO of ThoughtFish. ThoughtFish sells products on its own Web site and through a variety of online retailers. ThoughtFish also is getting ready to roll out its first hardware product: the RoboMosaic, a gadget that automatically assembles a mosaic based on instructions from the company’s software.
#Big fish isplash software
Today, ThoughtFish offers a variety of software products that customers use to convert photographs, fine art prints, and other images into mosaics, beadwork, and cross-stitch embroidery. “Soon we were selling $17,000 a month in software,” he says.
#Big fish isplash code
But once word got out about what he’d done, the code behind his creation took on a life of its own. When Andrew Simmons decided to create a mosaic mural for his bathroom wall, he wrote some software to guide him in placing the tiles to form a picture. Outsourcing to a 3PL has positioned ThoughtFish to increase revenues while keeping its infrastructure small.įounded in 2002, ThoughtFish got its start as a home improvement project. Outsourcing to a third party makes it easier to re-size infrastructure as needs change.” TILE TYCOONĪmong the companies that Shipwire is helping to ride out the current rough economy is ThoughtFish Media, Seattle, Wash. “Does the company fire employees? Does it lose the investment it has just made in training? In this economy, the ability to scale up and down is crucial. “But after that burst of sales, what happens?” asks Gilmore. A retailer that experiences a sudden surge in business might need to expand warehouse space and hire more employees. That point is especially important in a volatile economy. Finally, working with a 3PL allows a company to pay only for the services and capacity it needs.
#Big fish isplash full
Third, to cut costs even more, a 3PL might consolidate loads from several customers into full truckload (TL) shipments. That strategy reduces the number of miles that product must travel via more costly less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers. Second, by storing a company’s goods in multiple DCs across the country or around the world, a 3PL puts product closer to customers. First, a 3PL serving many shippers has enough volume to negotiate more favorable transportation rates. SMBs gain cost advantages from 3PLs in several ways. “But a third-party provider might have the transportation and warehousing relationships to get a local company into new markets less expensively than it would be able to on its own,” he says. “They could partner with a 3PL that knows the ropes in that geography,” Aimi says.Ī firm that manufactures on the West Coast, for instance, might not find it cost effective to serve East Coast customers from its own distribution center (DC), notes Jason Stoudt, general manager at DSC Logistics, a 3PL based in Des Plaines, Ill. It might also be a feasible way for local or regional companies that handle their own logistics to get up and running quickly in a new market. Outsourcing to a 3PL turns logistics into an expense rather than a capital cost, which might be a more feasible way to support growth. But in the current economy, securing a loan to finance an expansion is difficult.
Even if a small company operates its own warehouse, it will need more people and space as sales increase.
“Implementing supply chain operations requires substantial upfront capital costs,” adds Nate Gilmore, vice president of marketing and sales at Shipwire, a Sunnyvale, Calif., 3PL that specializes in fulfillment for online merchants. “One option for SMBs is to leverage a third-party logistics provider for a particular service, and treat it as an expense of doing business,” says Greg Aimi, director of supply chain research at Boston-based AMR Research. Getting warehouses, logistics staff, and information systems up and running requires a major investment, possibly more than an SMB can afford.
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