Fastest Growing Private Companies: Shipito

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When Czech immigrant John Vanhara founded Shipito four years ago, he was just hoping to make enough money to pay the rent on his warehouse after another business went bust.

He’s still surprised by how quickly Shipito grew into a booming business with annual revenue of more than $20 million. The Torrance company tops this year’s list of the fastest growing private companies in Los Angeles County.

Expansion poses a particular real estate challenge for Shipito. The company occupies about 114,000 square feet of warehouse space, spread across a half-dozen buildings in Torrance; Hawthorne; and Tualatin, Ore. Vanhara said he’d like to consolidate, but that has proved difficult in the area’s tight industrial real estate market.

“There’s very little available,” he said. “This is a great place to live, but it’s hard to find commercial space.”

Still, he plans to keep Shipito in the South Bay, which he said has a large and able workforce, and it is a more pleasant work environment than the Inland Empire, where warehouse space is more plentiful.

“It’s just better here – there’s better energy,” he said. “There are more people here, and people are more hungry to work.”

Shipito takes advantage of complexities in the global shipping industry that make it difficult or impossible for U.S. retailers to ship abroad. The company accepts parcels on behalf of its customers then forwards them overseas. It also consolidates multiple parcels into single packages, which can cut overseas shipping costs substantially.

Vanhara, who came to the United States to sell software as the dot-com boom was coming to an end, said the company has become a very big name in some countries.

“The director of the Russian express-mail postal service emailed me last year asking what kind of volume they could expect from us at Christmas,” Vanhara said. “It’s unbelievable. I would never believe stuff like that is possible.”

Today, Shipito has about 130,000 customers, up from 10,000 in 2009. Most of them are in Russia, Australia, the Czech Republic and Brazil. Vanhara relies on customers not only for word-of-mouth advertising – the company has done little marketing of its own – but also for letting Shipito know about the fastest, cheapest and most reliable shipping methods.

“There are a lot of countries and a lot of different ways to ship,” he said. “The customers tell us what might be working or what might be a good way to ship to a certain country, and we try to incorporate that.”

He also works with postal officials in different countries to figure out ways around certain restrictions, often resulting in Rube Goldbergesque solutions for getting packages from A to B with minimal delays and customs duties.

For instance, the United States Postal Service announced this year that it would no longer ship lithium-ion batteries or devices that contain them to Russia, Shipito’s biggest market. So, the company worked with the Russian post office to find a workaround.

“We put the packages on a truck to JFK airport. From there, they fly to Berlin, where the Russian post office opened a warehouse,” Vanhara said. “They have no problem with lithium batteries. From there, they go on a train to Moscow.”

SHIPITO

Torrance

BUSINESS: Mail services

FOUNDED: 2008

TWO-YEAR GROWTH RATE: 750%

2011 REVENUE: $20.1 million

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