Snaile is Canada’s largest smart locker network in Canada operating in 55+ Canadian towns & cities servicing residents by automatically accepting deliveries in condominiums, apartments, and student housing from carriers such as Amazon, FedEx, Purolator, UPS, DHL, Intelcom and Canpar. Snaile smart lockers also operate in office buildings & government offices accepting commercial parcel delivery and allowing for outbound parcel pickup by Canadian carriers. Snaile lockers can also be found in retail applications (BOPIS) such as pharmacies, auto parts, retailers, construction suppliers and IT asset management applications where companies can manage their inbound and outbound IT assets.
Tell us about yourself?
This is my 7th company. I start, build and sell businesses. I never wanted to work for anyone and always wanted to make sure that i was using all that i could muster so to never regret my career.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
You need to have several contigency plans for things you would have never thought of like major global supply chain issues and ongoing pandemics which affect your labour forces ability to work, change the way people want to work, decrease the labour pool, increase dramatically operating expenses, increase supply costs and increases fulfilment timelines significantly.
What problem does your business solve?
We remove the labour associated with managing deliveries in condos, apartments and student housing. We remove the theft and fire code violation aspect of parcel being left around in non-concierge buildings. We create 24/7 order pickup fulfilment for retailers (BOPIS). We provide labour-less management of assets, ie uniforms, computers, tools, parts….
What is the inspiration behind your business?
There was a hole in the Canadian marketplace for the supply of automated lockers. At the time, and still today, in Canada there were only resellers of other company’s lockers which came from overseas or from the US or straight up foreign suppliers. This not only is worse for the environment as the transportation carbon foot print is large due to international transport, it also meant that no companies were vertically integrated which poses problems for end-users in terms of support of both the software and hardware in Canada, as a reseller does not own the software and therefore can not support it. In addition it meant that Canadian laws around data privacy, cyber insurance and commercial data infrastructure where ignored and left Canadian companies unknowingly circumventing Canadian data privacy laws. To address all these shortcomings in the market, Snaile was born.
What is your magic sauce?
We are the OEM and are vertically integrated (own hardware and software in Canada), cater to the Canadian marketplace, hold contracts with key stake holders to ensure our service works and has contractual recourse to rectify, are partnered with most softwares that compliment our services in Canada, Made in Canada, hosted in Canada, ISO27001 certified in Canada, 22 service and support teams throughout Canada, service 300+ large Canadian companies, including data and IT infrastructure sensitive customers like major governments, pharmacies, and universities.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Continue to build out our locker network and drive recurring revenue until i am satisfied with the exit number.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
The pandemic and the resulting ongoing supply chain issues and labour issues. We on-shored 95% of our production in Q4 to Canada. This removed our reliance on Taiwan, UK, and Signapore while drastically decreasing our transportation costs & carbon footprint. We gained much more speed and control making the metals and doing the assembly in Mississauga.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
Snaile, Canada’s Parcel Locker Company. Visit snailelockers.com or email info@snaile.com for more information and how we may be able to help you!