The refrigerated aisle is our moat. Building a cold supply chain is expensive and hard. That's exactly why our biggest competitors haven't followed us there.
We test designs with batches of 100 units. If it sells, we make 1,000. If it doesn't, we stop. Zero inventory risk. Traditional retailers order 10,000 units and pray. We use data. They use hope.
A dress on Shein costs $8. A similar dress at Zara costs $50. We can do that because we ship directly from the factory to the customer. No warehouse. No retail store. No middleman. That's $42 of fat we cut out.
People ask how we sell a dress for $3. The answer is: we skip every middleman. Factory to app. No warehouse, no brand markup, no retail rent. The $3 dress costs $1.50 to make. The margins are thin but they exist.
I grew up in a factory town in Zhejiang. My parents worked in manufacturing. I understand factories. I understand supply chains. Temu is not a tech company pretending to understand manufacturing. It's the other way around.
The fashion supply chain in Asia is a $500 billion market run on WhatsApp messages and handshake deals. We wanted to digitize that entire chain — from factory to customer.
I was Tesla's head of supply chain. I saw how dependent the world was on Asian battery factories. Europe needs its own. That's not nationalism — it's industrial survival.
Panasonic, Ford, Toyota, and Volkswagen are all our partners. They supply us with battery scrap and buy back the refined materials. We're not competing with automakers — we're completing their supply chain.
We can recover 95% of the critical minerals from a dead battery — lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper — and turn them back into battery-grade materials. That's not recycling. That's a closed-loop supply chain.
You cannot track a shipping container the way you track an Amazon package. That is insane. That was the problem we set out to fix.
COVID proved that supply chains are the most important infrastructure in the world and also the most neglected.
SpaceX needs 10x more precision parts than they can source. The bottleneck in space is not rockets — it is the supply chain that makes the rocket parts.
The restaurant supply business is not glamorous. Nobody writes articles about us. But every restaurant in America needs plates, pans, and fryers, and we deliver them cheaper than anyone.
The key to wholesale is volume and efficiency. Every penny we save on logistics is a penny we can pass to the customer. That compounds over decades.
India wastes 40% of its fresh produce between farm and table. That's not a supply chain. That's a supply tragedy.
Vertical integration is not a strategy. It is survival. If you do not control your supply chain, someone else will — and they will use it against you.