John “Jack” Peck of FastFetch shares his insights into the future of the distribution industry, and life lessons he's gained along the way.
 

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Danny:
- Well hello and welcome to today's IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Jack Peck who is the president and CEO of FastFetch Corporation. Jack, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.
Jack:
- Well it's a pleasure to be here.
Danny:
- Well I'm excited to jump into today's conversation and learn a little bit more about you and a little bit more about FastFetch. So to start with, for those who aren't familiar with FastFetch, give us a little snapshot of who you guys are and what you do.
Jack:
- Okay, well my elevator pitch typically is, you know when you order something online and you hit the enter button, and two days later it shows up at your house? A lot of stuff happens between the time you press that button and it shows up. We're responsible for part of that stuff. If you wanted to get more specific, FastFetch really produces software and hardware for order fulfillment in distribution centers and warehouses. We take orders. We do a lot of optimization, use a lot of artificial intelligence to get them out of the door quickly and accurately, in a snapshot.
Danny:
- Excellent. Well it sounds like that thing seems to be kind of important these days, especially as online ecomm is, I was reading a report how last year—because of the pandemic, so in 2020—the increase, it went up by 40% or something like that. I think we're going to have some great things to be able to unpack here in the rest of this episode. But before we really dive into that, I want to know a little bit more about you. I want to know more about Jack. I want to know—take me back. How did you get into this space? Was it something that you studied in school? Was it as a kid, you were tinkering around with it? What was that?
Jack:
- Well things happen according to things you didn't necessarily plan. When I was an undergraduate major, I was a math major. I did a lot of work. My PhD was actually in petroleum engineering and computer science, a combination of those which is a long ways away from distribution.
Danny:
- Just a little bit, yeah.
Jack:
- But you learn a lot about computers. You learn a lot about people. You learn a lot about research, innovation, entrepreneurialship, all of those things regardless of what the field is. When I went to Clemson University as an assistant professor, I looked for opportunities to do research. Some of those opportunities were brought to me by other people outside the university, and so I played on that and did a lot of work in social services, did a lot of work really for the governor's office. I did a lot of work in Medicaid, the health department, did a whole bunch of work in mental health. That was primarily database work. Then around 1987 my kids were getting to the age where I was going to have to put them through college. I said, I better start earning some money outside the university. You do get opportunities like that during the summers in education when you're looking for things to do.

So I started a company, Foxfire Technologies. Foxfire actually specialized in manufacturing systems, real-time shop floor control primarily for apparel manufacturing. Well when apparel and textile started moving offshore to the islands and to Central American and now of course to Asia, that opportunity started to dry up some,