Venture Stories: Doing For Atoms What AWS Did For Bits with Jesse Genet of Lumi
What does Lumi do? Lumi helps brands source and manage all of their packaging. Things like boxes, tissue paper, packing slips etc…
Building a business that is super niche isn’t new for Jesse: My co-founder and I ran a business that made fabric dye that develops its color in sunlight. We ran that business for 4 years.
The pitch to businesses: Why wrangle with 15 or 20 different packaging vendors when you can spend that time running your business?
The packaging industry right now is complicated: It is still a network of brokers. It is still relationship-driven. There are costs added with each additional layer that sits between manufacturers and the company buying the packaging.
The future opportunity for Lumi: As e-commerce grows, packaging will grow as well. E-commerce is still less than 15% of all retail purchases.
What makes Lumi hard to compete with? Packaging is boring and hard.
Why do things that are boring and hard? I think going down a rabbit hole that you feel no one else will go down is a valid human effort. It may not work out, but you can’t pioneer on a well-traveled path.
Why companies should invest in packaging: For direct to consumer companies packaging is the new storefront.
Every business process is becoming a separate company created to serve product makers: Lumi is one example. Another one is Happy Returns. They manage the entire reverse logistics process. They handle the entire process of customers returning products, instead of a company dealing with that process themselves.
Great quote from Jesse’s twitter bio: I stuck to a simple idea for an unreasonable amount of time.