I often get asked how James and James Fulfilment was started, so I thought I’d write it here for the next time I get asked! It’s a good story, but one that requires going back a little first.

Background

I’ve always been academically gifted. At school I’d get straight A’s and I went on to the University of Cambridge to study engineering, then transferred to manufacturing engineering after two years.

This is a small course of around 40 people, focused on design, production, business and finance. Of the 40, around 15 go on to investment banking, 15 will do management consultancy in the City and the remaining few will actually do some engineering.

So, being the engineer, I made the tedious job application process more efficient by mail merging my name, the company name and the reason I wanted to work there into cover letters, and then sent off 25 applications to management consultancies.

I got one interview.

I went to their selection process, leaving their technical exam in under an hour, not realising that most people failed to finish it within the 2 hour limit. I got the job! And then promptly turned it down. Whilst it sounded exciting, flying over Europe helping companies improve their operations, it also sounded very dull.

Our first business

By random chance, a Business Angel was advertising on the message board for a new apprentice. Previously he’d run a scheme where you started a business for him for a year, then he would help you fund your own idea. He’d made his money when the internet was first founded and had become a bit of a philanthropist.

This year he was doing things differently - he provided a list of 50 ideas, you’d choose one and he’d help. A friend, another James, was in a similar position, and so we both decided to take him up on the offer.

Some of the ideas on the list were quite unconventional, some we struggled to make commercially viable. We chose the one we thought we had the best chance with - removable gardens to rent - and decided to start on hanging baskets; BloomBox was born.

There’s another set of takes here, but for a while I spent spring and autumn making hanging baskets and driving a van, and the rest of the time doorstep selling, cold calling and trying to generate some publicity. It was fun at times, but it wasn’t going anywhere fast.

After two years, we finally took a step back and realised just how badly this was going. We were making less than minimum wage, working crazy hours and not exactly putting our skills to best use.

A change of direction

Whilst most of my friends were earning six figure salaries in the City, I took a part time job whilst I found something better to do, and began working in someone’s house helping them sell Manuka Honey online. I also got ‘other James’ a job working on their website.

They had an outsourced warehouse in Norfolk, which caused no end of issues. They would hold all the stock and ship it when an order came in. It was all done by email, with a fax once a week presenting a stock report, which may or may not have included the orders for that day. It was a nightmare. Once, they shipped every order twice! (This was actually a good day because most customers we called decided to keep the second delivery).

We wanted to find a better solution and went to visit a few different fulfilment companies which were a little more modern and professional. What struck us, in this world of online commerce, was that everyone was using servers in their building and transferring information to and from the web every hour by FTP. [FTP is a file transfer process where files are left by one server, downloaded by another, read, updated and the response uploaded to the original server at a later date].

To put this in the context of eCommerce, imagine processing a credit card purchase online using this technology: you enter your details, click “Checkout”, and a file gets transferred to a server. VISA check in occasionally and find this file, try and process the transaction but decline the card; they respond with another file. More time passes and this file is picked up by the website and your order is refused. But now, this is an hour later and you’re not at your PC anymore, let alone still have the checkout page open.

In the world of online order processing, having data that’s an hour old causes all sorts of issues, from not knowing exactly what your stock situation is, to not knowing the status of an order etc. etc. Few of these companies were using the best practices we’d learnt at University, and most of their systems were descendants from bulk pallet logistics or built by IT companies that simply didn’t have any real world experience.

Founding James and James

We decided that if the industry was this far in the past, maybe we could do a better job. Our plan was to create a software platform built from first principles that was process driven, used best practice and was done from scratch - without preconceptions or constraints. We’d prove it with a few clients, and then sell it to other fulfilment companies as Software as a Service (SaaS) - though we continued to run physical operations too for reasons I’ll go into another time.

Given our jobs were part time, I spent my afternoons shipping all of the smaller orders from the office and other James spent his time coding the platform. This was successful enough that we rented the corner of a grotty warehouse, and moved our office into a kitchen.

As they say, the rest is history. From two guys in a corner of a warehouse, we’re now well over 100 people operating across multiple sites.

What made it so successful?

I think it could be summed up as the following...

We weren't experienced logistics operators with the baggage of how things used to be done. We weren't a software house with no idea on how logistics should work. We were a couple of engineers, who understood the principles of good process design and could see the failings of the industry to address them.

We're very principled on best practice, process driven and we created the software platform from scratch - without preconceptions or constraints.

We were a cloud based fulfilment company to serve a market that operated in the cloud. That wasn't something that others were doing back then - and many still aren’t.