Travis Mariea is doing his best to move product inventory as smoothly as possible for his clients, who want to put merchandise into the hands of customers but do not have a traditional logistics staff.
He acknowledges that even with significant strides for his business, Flxpoint Inc., he has work to do.
“We run warehouse logistics for brands,” he said.
“Any brand, any local company that wants to outsource for logistics, that has really blown up on the past 10 years,” Mariea said from the 320 N. First St. sixth-floor office in Jacksonville Beach overlooking the shoreline and pier.
“The strategy for growth is to build our product to be a platform that has partners who connect with each other“ between suppliers and retailers, Mariea said.
“We’re trying to build a product that makes that viral loop-to-loop. That network effect is the growth strategy.”
He said Flxpoint tries to serve the needs of suppliers and retailers to work together.
Flxpoint is an offshoot of Inventory Source.
Flxpoint with the 36-year-old Mariea and three co-founders – Kelly Dyer, Matt Myers and Brad Hamilton – went into the new branch in 2020 as the pandemic spread. (Dyer also is founder of SourceFuse, page 13.)
They have landed clients ranging from Discovery Channel to RadioShack among others.
Flxpoint’s specialty is providing the logistics for companies that don’t have that experience.
The service is augmented by the company’s 74 employees in the U.S. and India. About half that number is in Jacksonville Beach.
The service provides software that syncs inventory from warehouses to multiple suppliers to websites and marketplace accounts.
It is an integration system taking the physical to the digital and places merchandise for sale online.
The service costs about $800 a month on average and it lifts the burden of moving inventory from the client, Mariea said.
Flxpoint’s revenue rose to more than $2.5 million for 2021 from $960,000 in 2020, he said.
Michael Crowley, a friend who helped launch an e-commerce company in 2014, said he is not surprised about Flxpoint’s growth.
“Travis has that ability to take something that’s not working and not organized and really make it efficient and be able to scale it and create processes around that and figure out what’s needed,” he said.
Mariea said growth will come with a building-block philosophy that will rely on clients not only providing word-of-mouth but moving merchandise smoothly from warehouses to their customers.
“If we do that really well they will tell the next trading partner that they have to work with, ‘Let’s just use Flxpoint,’” Mariea said.
The Jacksonville native considers the Jacksonville Beach offices overlooking the shoreline as a recruiting tool for potential employees.
“I incorporate what I like, which is generally the water. We’re trying to stay at the Beaches as long as possible. It makes life more fun,” he said.
