Driving Our Economy Forward: Shappi
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF) — It’s a business that provides freight and logistics services to other businesses, ensuring transportation. Taken from the words “shipping” and “happy”, Shappi brings American products to Latin America using a network of travelers. We have details on the app in this week’s Driving Our Economy Forward.
“What Shappi does is connecting people from Latin America to be able to access goods from the US in a very unique way. We use travelers, so we have a travel logistic company. Everything that we undertake here is going to be assigned to a US traveler. So imagine, DoorDash for international shipping. Shop is allowing people to get things and goods through people who are already traveling in a very safe with an under the compliance of custom regulations to be able to deliver those things,” said Carla Valdieso, founder of Shappi.
“Working at Shappi has been awesome because it’s really shown me a different side of things. As far as like, you know, you wake up every day with mail and I never would have thought twice about how they get mail or how they get shipments anywhere else. So just broaden my broaden my horizons on everything. Really like logistics, people, relationships,” Justin Kulick, Operations Manager at Shappi.
“There are 7 million people in South America that can’t access U.S. goods. And I wanted to create something that a lot of people outside of the US to be able to purchase anything they want and be able to get that through, their livery to their doors outside the US,” said Valdieso.
“If notice, the amount of jobs they create in the community create also is amazing. The mayor of the city comes by every now and then. Just to say hi, you know, bring people around. It’s amazing how much they’ve like, grown and branched out in the two years they’ve been around. It’s amazing. I think that kind of growth shows great potential. I mean, they are destined to do great things,” said Jaylenn Humphrey, an employee at Shappi.
“Behind me we have what is called I stage. They are hardware and computer systems where every single product that comes into a warehouse gets intact. And when that goes into there, our system is able to detect the category product information to be able to match with the traveler under custom regulations. That’s one of the main things that we do. So every single product that goes in, goes through all this, hardware that we created in-house,” said Valdieso.
“We’re super proud of what we’ve built. We came with an idea, proof of concept. But here in Chattanooga, we’re able to make this real and have real customers and be able to expand our business in logistics space. We have delivered more than $5 million just a while, just in the last 12 months. That has allowed us to be able to give us, very compelling story of where we are and where are we going to go. And has allowed us to get more interest from local banks to be able to empower Shopee. In that way, we can give back to the community by hiring people from here, Chattanooga, and also, creating more tech. That is changing, a hub in the logistics space,” said Valdieso.
