A South Jersey company, once focused on being a wholesaler of packaging materials, is now betting big on its technology to make it an e-commerce game changer capable of competing with the likes of Amazon.
Based in Voorhees, Trinity Packaging Supply was founded in 2010 by Rowan University alum Anthony Magaraci and now has 45 employees. It has increased revenue over 320% from 2017 to 2022, and was among the country's fastest-growing private companies this past year, according to Inc. While revenue continues to soar – the company reported $73 million last year, a dramatic increase from the $33.3 million it reported in 2019 and the $17.3 million in 2017 – Magaraci has far bigger goals in mind.
He wants revenue in the billions, he said. While that may still be a number of years off – the CEO is projecting revenue of $100 million in 2023 – he believes the company's software can help it get there in the next five years. More than that, he believes it can disrupt the e-commerce industry.
Trinity Packaging's software, known as SupplyStream, sifts through hundreds of packaging supplier catalogues to present users with a storefront of the best prices for items like boxes, pallets, office supplies and other shipping-related goods.
While currently focused on packaging, the e-commerce technology powering that experience can be applied to a number of different verticals and gives smaller materials suppliers an avenue to reach more customers. Magaraci hopes that can be a catalyst for Trinity to be a major player in the online retail industry.
"We intend to disrupt the entire wholesale industry," Magaraci said. "It's a cool dynamic. It's equally as disruptive as it is enabling, because what it's doing is it's really supporting local businesses by being able to fulfill these orders. They're giving us aggressive pricing because it's providing a platform for them to compete on a national level."
Part of the way it's doing that is by making the process easy to use, as well as giving it a sleeker look, which is different from the wholesale industry's antiquated designs, he said. In building out the current website Magaraci's goal was to make it look as "if Google and Apple got together and created a packaging supply company."
The platform is built for B2B sales, though individual consumers can use it. However, many of the suppliers offer more competitive pricing in bulk. Its wholesale customers have included Nike, Pepsi, Home Depot, Walmart, Target and Coca-Cola.
SupplyStream is registered as a C-corp and is separate from Trinity Packaging. Magaraci sees it as a "business generator" that can power other e-commerce companies. Those companies could be owned by Trinity Packaging and run on SupplyStream, but focused on different verticals such as plumbing or janitorial supplies. Operating as such would give the company more revenue streams that could result in "exponential growth," Magaraci said.
To create the SupplyStream technology, Magaraci has reinvested some $7.5 million into the company over the past 3.5 years. It has been entirely self-funded thus far. Right now, the company is working to compete with ULine, a packaging materials distributor that had $6.1 billion in revenue last year, according to Forbes.
While the company wants to go toe-to-toe with the likes of ULine, Magaraci has loftier goals for SupplyStream.
"We built this to transcend industries," Magaraci said, adding that SupplyStream's ability to instantaneously process pricing, shipping, and other data from supplier catalogues in seconds gives it the potential to "compete with Amazon."
"We're creating a way to band together suppliers of local businesses to compete with these conglomerates, these billion-dollar companies more efficiently," Magaraci said.
Magaraci feels like he is "mining gold" with the SupplyStream technology and the data it processes to bring more cost effective prices and efficient shipping to customers.
To accelerate growth, Magaraci hopes to raise funding soon, but doesn't have a target number in mind yet. He said the money would go toward adding teams to head up the various verticals the company is trying to break into, and hiring a development team to further build out the SupplyStream technology.
