Established at the height of the pandemic, Locad offers on-demand warehousing and an international fulfillment network for e-commerce players of all stripes. We talked to co-founder (and former SCMAP director) Jannis Dargel (right photo) on the startup’s future plans and hopes for e-commerce in the coming years.
What led to the founding of Locad?
We are experienced entrepreneurs with a track record in building some of Asia’s leading technology companies. Constantin Robertz and I previously worked together at Zalora, before he moved on to start logistics company Entrego, which has has emerged as one of the country’s leading delivery firms. Our CTO and co-founder Shrey Jain previously worked in a senior product role at Grab, building the regions leading transportation platform.
In our previous roles we worked with many brands in their e-commerce journey, and realized that access to professional fulfllment that can scale with your business is a key building block for brands, and that there are few suitable options in the market. We set out to built Locad to address that and partner with brands in their e-commerce journey.
What gaps in the supply chain does Locad aim to address?
Locad enables brands with scalable and localized fulfillment. Brands can seamlessly integrate and automate order and inventory management across multiple sales channels and fulfillment locations, and monitor their business in real time via Locad’s control tower.
Through the fulfillment network, brands can flexibly add warehouses to their own B2C supply chain, creating a more localized and scalable fulfillment infrastructure. It integrates with shipping providers across the region for fast delivery from any of its fulfillment centers to the end customer.
How does being with Locad benefit both small online sellers and major e-commerce players?
Locad was designed to enable brands and retailers to level up their e-commerce supply chain and keep up with rising demand and high customer expectations. Our logistics cloud gives brands and sellers access to a sophisticated fulfillment infrastructure on demand and at flexible terms. We provide the backend infrastructure of e-commerce as a service, so brands can plug in to existing tech and fulfillment infrastructure and focus their time on sales and marketing. We strive to empower e-commerce brands to focus on growing their business rather than getting tied up in operational complexities such as packing orders and inventory updates.
How did other logistics players respond to Locad’s offers for partnership and collaboration?
We are partnering with local and regional heroes in the warehousing, logistics and freight forwarding industry with the key focus on building the biggest fulfillment partner network in Southeast Asia. The goal is to empower through technology and end-to-end visibility along the fulfillment journey, while helping our partners to increase utilization of existing assets. This collaboration spans beyond fulfillment operations alone and can include a commercial partnership to empower existing brands of fulfillment partners to expand their online presence.
Is the response different in the Philippines compared to the other countries you operate in?
The response across the board has been overwhelmingly positive. As the shopfront was democratized by platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce over the past years, brands across Southeast Asia are looking for a solution to simplify the fulfillment operations. Locad has also expanded to cover Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore.
What’s on the pipeline for Locad in the coming years?
Locad will continue to expand the fulfillment network and offering across Southeast Asia and Australia, while offering granular end to end visibility. While integrating with existing local and regional heroes, it is our mission to continuously improve customer experience by bringing goods closer to the destination using forward stock locations.
Where do you see last mile logistics players in the coming years, as e-commerce continues to grow?
Supply chain is being transformed by digitalization and e-commerce, changing a traditionally rigid industry with demand for more flexible and agile solutions and a need to integrate data flows across disjointed physical supply chains.
Given the fragmentation of the logistics landscape in Asia-Pacific, we believe that an open platform approach that aggregates existing capacities in the market and connects a fragmented field of local logistics providers into an inter-compatible network can make a major step forward in levelling up the state of logistics in Southeast Asia.