Mike Willoughby of PFS discusses his winding tech career, and how he's seen the ecommerce market evolve since even before the internet.
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Danny:
- Well hello, and welcome to today's IndustrialSage Executive Series. I'm joined by Mike Willoughby who is the CEO of
PFS. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.
Mike:
- Oh, it's my pleasure Danny. Thanks for having me on.
Danny:
- Well I am excited to jump into today's episode. So you're coming in from Dallas, Texas, and for those who are unfamiliar with the weather going on right now, we were talking about beforehand, you've actually got snow going on there.
Mike:
- We do. It's unusual. Texas is not known for having a lot of snow events, but this is our second this year. We were actually talking earlier about the one we had last year, so we're definitely not getting a repeat of that, thank goodness. Nobody wants to spend a week with spotty power and the kind of freeze that we had a year ago. So just some nice, pleasant snowflakes going on outside my window.
Danny:
- That sounds nice, not like what you guys had last year. So glad it's—
Mike:
- Definitely not.
Danny:
- And like we were talking about here, it's crazy because it's 70-something degrees over here. Whatever you got's coming over here, so we'll see what happens.
- Have fun with that.
Danny:
- Thank you. Alright, for those who aren't familiar with PFS, what do you guys do?
Mike:
- Well, so PFS provides order fulfillment services, to put it simply. We provide for our clients a premium order fulfillment solution, so if you think about brands that care a lot about their unboxing experience, what it really means to get, say, a Chanel health and beauty product or a high-end luxury jewelry item, you're probably not expecting that to come in just a plain brown box with a bunch of air pillows around it. You're probably expecting that it's got some boutique-caliber experience. We do that for our clients. It's a very non-Amazon kind of experience where you would equate that with, if you were going to a boutique and you were going to shop that boutique, you're going to carry that package out. You're probably spending a decent amount for the product itself, and the experience that you're going to have when you actually receive that product yourself if you're shopping in the store, you want to have as much of that as possible if you're going to receive that package on your front door delivered by a courier.
We provide a fulfillment experience across both the way that we manage the order as it comes into our systems, the way that we process payments, ultimately the way that we take the product out of our fulfillment centers, package it appropriately for each brand that we support, and then tender it to a carrier to get it to your doorstep and then provide the customer service that goes along with that, if you have a question about your product. And we want to do that in a way that reflects the brand, that we are not in the way of that at all. You're never going to see the words PFS on any kind of packaging, on an invoice, your interaction with a customer service agent. Our intention is to be on-brand and reflect the brand that we've been entrusted to support. So that's what we do.
Danny:
- Excellent, very cool. So yeah, very different than a traditional Amazon experience where the experience is the big piece of value, right?
Mike:
- Right. Well, you know with Amazon it's all about efficiency, and they do an amazing job of creating an efficient tra...
