Welcome to another episode of growth challenges for manufacturers and how to overcome them. I’m your host, Katherine Seymour. This episode is brought to you by MacRAE’S, trusted by North American businesses for over 100 years. As a leader in B2B digital marketing, we help industrial and manufacturing companies struggling with stagnant growth or lead generation. By Trellus leveraging advanced AI integration and automation into our SEO and lead generation programs,
growth challenges for manufacturers and how to overcome them. I’m your host, Katherine Seymour. This episode is brought to you by MacRAE’S tested and worked by North American businesses for over 100 years. As a leader in B2B digital marketing, we help industrial manufacturing companies struggling with their growth or degeneration. By Trellus leveraging advanced AI integration and automation into our SEO and degeneration program,
We help you appear more prominently on search and AI results like chat
GPT. This drives significantly more qualified traffic to your website, resulting in lead flow and increased revenue crucial in today’s competitive digital landscape. Learn more at macraes.com today. Today I’m joined by Adam Haber, co-founder and CEO of By Trellus Trellus.
This drives significant more qualified traffic to your website resulting in lethal and increased revenues crucial in today’s competitive digital landscape. Learn more at mccreeze.com today. Today I’m joined by Adam Haber, co-founder and CEO of By Trellus Trellus.
a company on a mission to empower local businesses with same-day delivery at a fraction of the cost of national carriers, By Trellus Trellus has built, has
given independent retailers and service providers and even small businesses the ability to compete with big box stores and e-com giants without sacrificing march-ins or customer relationships. The platform connects businesses with a unique network of local drivers enabling fast,
has given independent retailers and service providers and even small businesses the ability to compete with big block stores and become giants without sacrificing merchants or customer relationships. The platform connects businesses with a unique network of local drivers enabling
fast, affordable, and reliable sustainability that keeps dollars circulating with meaning. Adam, it’s great to have you here. Welcome to the show.
affordable and reliable same-day delivery that keeps dollars circulating in the community. Adam, it’s great to have you here. Welcome to the show.
Katherine, thanks for including me and enjoying me. I appreciate it. Well, ⁓ the company’s called Trellus. The website is bytrellus.com, which is a little confusing because there’s a health company named Trellus. it’s a unique business model that solves a problem.
Thank you so much. Let’s get started with your journey. What inspired you to launch By Trellus And what problems were you trying to solve for local businesses?
There’s two parts to a model. One’s B2B logistics and one is a true e-commerce marketplace where people support independent small businesses and get things quickly so they’re beating Amazon at their own game. But every idea has a problem that they solve. I was commuting around Tripp from Manhattan three hours and every time I was coming home, I would get a call from my wife, who I love, who would say, ⁓ please pick up a toy. Your daughter’s got a birthday party, a bottle of wine.
Bye.
Can you get flowers, gift basket, clothing, anything you need from a local store? And I’m like, I don’t want to do that. I just worked 12 hours and commuted three hours. Why isn’t there an app or a marketplace where I can literally tap a mouse or click a button and have things magically at my house in about an hour or two hours? It doesn’t exist. It exists for food and it exists for big box chains like Walmart and Target and Best Buy and Home Depot.
Yeah.
but it doesn’t exist for independent small businesses. So the business was started to fill that need. And we started with Last Mile Logistics because after I interviewed about 150 merchants about what they needed to survive and thrive in an e-commerce world, they said we need affordable logistics and we to be driven to orders without getting ripped off. So we always intended to be an e-commerce marketplace, but we started as a logistics provider and we have almost 700 merchants we work with right
Fantastic. That’s amazing. And for sure, nobody wants to stop on the way home if they could just get home and relax, for sure. Many small businesses struggle to compete with Amazon and large retailers. How does Trellus level the playing field to help them?
Okay, thank you.
This is a struggle to keep.
Alright, so there’s two parts. We started about four and half years ago. As I mentioned, the easier way for these merchants to adapt was to provide a service for them that had very low risk and provided value. And there’s Uber for, and DoorDash, and Grubhub, and Seamless for food. And then there is Amazon for national brands and commodity based items.
but your local florist, toy store, gift shop, bakery. We do quite a bit of food, farms, pharmacy, liquor stores, everything you’d find in your community where you know the business owner’s name. For them to have a full-time driver, it’s at 18 bucks an hour plus gas, car, insurance. It’s about 70 grand a year. And many of these businesses didn’t need 25 deliveries a day. They used it as you go. So we created a very unique model where
Bye.
We have two parts, one is a freemium model, we’re at 699 a stop, up to five miles and about 50 a mile. And one’s a SAS based platform that routes, know, farms with CSAs, which is their monthly vegetable packaging delivered to individual consumers, pharmacy, florists who do tons of deliveries during Mother’s Day. And that’s 699 a stop plus a dollar 50 a mile within five miles.
Bye.
And then we start again from the last stop. So you could deliver 100 miles away and that last stop is same day, 699. So that was a huge winner. We’ve done almost 200,000 deliveries since we started, but that’s the model that drives value to these businesses because their logistics costs are a fraction of what they used to be. And the second part, which is we’re literally launching as we speak, is building an e-commerce platform where there’s everything you need.
Got it.
Right.
So we launched Fresh in Long Island. We have 125 merchants with 30,000 SKUs. If I had to draw a police sketch of who our customer is, it would be you. A busy working woman who shops more online than men do, grew up with their phone. ⁓ And it works. We’re driving orders to these merchants. We take 10%. There’s no warehouse or warehouses there store. We’re expanding this month to the North Bay of San Francisco for wineries and boutiques and everything else. And then we’re be adding two-day ground
Yeah.
where we’ll be basically two days from anybody in America who wants to support a small business. So now you truly can find what you want and need, either hyper local and get it in about 90 minutes or have it delivered in a couple days. And that’s where the model is right now.
Mm-hmm.
Very cool. For listeners who may not know Trellus yet, how would you describe it to them in one sentence?
Thank you.
⁓ Trellus is an on-demand marketplace where you can buy things from the stores you know and loving it delivered to you same day.
Amazing. Local businesses are the backbone to many communities, but face huge challenges with logistics as you mentioned. I know you pinpointed some ⁓ obstacles that they were facing, but what is the biggest obstacles that they’re facing currently? Is it purely economical or is it just labour shortages as well?
biggest optical representation.
⁓
Well, the world’s dynamic, it’s changing as we speak. AI is going to reinvent, you know, online businesses. There’s driverless cars who are now trying to deliver things in the gig economy by the wayside. But the mom and pop small businesses, and there’s 10.2 million of them in America, half of them which fit our model, the other half are restaurants. They need orders. 25 % of every single retail purchase is done online. And if you don’t,
Yeah.
Bye.
have a way to connect with your customer that’s easy and convenient, they’re going to go to Amazon. Amazon’s made it so easy. Walmart’s done the same. Target’s done the same. So what we’re doing is we’re basically acting for about half of our merchants as their e-commerce platform. They just list all their products on our website. So they lose that worry about having ⁓ an e-commerce site to keep up. And we’re driving them orders. So now they have an e-commerce presence.
Right.
Yeah.
and they can direct people to it. And the fact that we only take 10 % of the order plus whatever the credit card processing is goes to our credit card processor. They’re happy to give that up as opposed to the 30, 40 or 50 % by the time you’re done with a little fees that the major corporations basically have algorithms to squeeze every nickel out of you. So there’s been mass adoptions from these merchants and what these businesses need is they need to stay in business. They need orders, they need traffic, they need the ability to…
Have consumers think of them first when they’re running late and you’ve got to get a toy for your daughter’s birthday party or pick up a pair of sneakers before you go on a trip or a book that you don’t want to run out and get. It’s anything but hot food all in one place.
Yeah.
⁓ How have your customers expectations around delivery and speed and convenience shift? How do you see the small businesses adapting? Is it strictly just taking your service and really adapting to it or do they have other ideas in mind?
you
It’s period.
Well, it literally just takes three minutes to onboard for just delivery and the customers can start putting deliveries in within 30 seconds. So those are that are a little more savvy and aren’t afraid of tech. And I don’t want to stereotype here, but think of a 75 year old balding man with a ponytail who has an AOL on the website and a toy store that’s been the same since 1975. And they’re afraid of change, but you have a boutique
Amazing.
Yeah.
run by Gen X or Gen Z who grew up with their phones. They get the tech, they don’t need us. They literally start and know how to use it. They upload their inventory and it works out really nicely. So what these businesses need is to stay in business and they need to adapt or they’re just gonna die, unfortunately. And you can’t fight against a trillion dollar company with 3000 programmers and 200,000 employees.
⁓
But there’s this huge open space nobody’s going after is aggregating these small local businesses and providing the services they need to compete.
For sure, for sure. With inflation, rising costs and supply chain disruptions, what strategies have you found the most effective to providing your services to small businesses?
The ability for them to offer a flash sale or a discount Get things to people quickly give them a presence Online we actually have a full social media team and marketing team will do tick tocks and Instagrams free of charge as part of our service to engage customers We have a great break company called Johnny Brits That uses us as their website
and exclusively for social media and they get driven orders on a regular basis. They think this is the greatest thing ever. So being willing to try new things and adapt to different technologies that are not groundbreaking, we’re just doing something more efficiently that’s been done before in the food space. But it’s hard to sign up a small business. It’s easy to sign up a large chain that will do a thousand deliveries, but a small business that will do one or two a day aggregated is a giant.
Cool.
Yeah.
but one off is not. So we’re doing the hard work of getting them together and the adoption process was slow and now it’s a flood.
Cool. Trellus has built a network that makes same-day deliveries possible to scale. Can you walk us through how your platform works behind the scenes to achieve that?
Sure, we’re a tech company. when somebody, a merchant gets an order on their website, if they have Shopify, we integrate with Shopify and the customer self-selects that they want same day delivery, that’s up to them. But if the merchant gets an order over the phone or somehow differently than through Trellus, all they do is they type in a…
I guess a ticket, it’s kind of like UPS ticket. You put a name address, some notes where it’s going, hit send, the closest driver gets pinged. The merchant and the consumer can follow along every step of the way so they know exactly where the driver is. We have a very high success rate, almost 100 % because of our tracking. We’ve never had a package stolen because of the way we alert the customer. And on completion, there’s a whole background of photographs and receipts.
Rain.
so you know that it was delivered successfully. And it’s easy to do. And when you do a batch, meaning over two deliveries at a time where we use the last stop as the place where the clock starts ticking again to start charging, you can either upload a spreadsheet or just do one at a time and see how much it costs. And we get feedback from our merchants to change or add bells and whistles, but they absolutely love it. And when they get orders from us,
Yeah.
you know, you could see tears in their eyes. They see that someone finally cares about them and then someone’s out there to help them stay in business and feed their families. And that’s one of the reasons why we’re expanding to the North Bay of San Francisco. It’s small business head in there. They’re really big on shopping local, lot of independent wineries and boutiques and bakeries and things like that that are embracing us. So it’s exciting.
Yeah
How do you ensure businesses and customers have a seamless experience ⁓ from order to delivery?
So let’s say, Katherine, you wanted to buy a extra large sweatshirt in blue for somebody that you like and you send them a gift. You just literally tap buy after a few clicks and put in an address where it’s getting delivered to with a note, hey, enjoy this extra large blue sweatshirt from Katherine. And the customer gets the order. They have to accept the order. It’s not like an automatic thing where the order goes into a void.
you
Right.
And we do that because if they’re out of the extra large blue sweatshirt that you’re sending as a gift, they can call you. And you have a direct connection with the customer, which doesn’t happen anywhere else. say, Katherine, we’re out of blue. Would you like green? If not, where we found you your money? And you say, my god, that’s great. I’ll take green instead. And then they put the order in. It’s all done automatically. Driver gets pinged. They have a delivery time to set up. So if it takes them a half an hour to bag it or
⁓
Right.
put it in a box, that’s when the delivery driver gets notified and naturally gets picked up and dropped off and it comes same day.
That’s pretty cool, especially with the call between ⁓ the actual company or the business and the purchaser, it keeps that local business vibe together. So that’s really cool.
the actual company or the business and the participate.
Yeah, it’s a human connection.
We’re losing that with with being online The the customer and the merchant can also call the driver. my god having a barbecue next door. Can you drop there? It’s unique. It’s a white glove service at a very affordable price
Yeah
Looking ahead, what trends in e-commerce, logistics, or small business support do you see will most impact Trellus’ growth?
You
The trend is there seems to be a backlash against Big Brother and trillion dollar companies who are focused on buying 400 foot mega yachts and blasting into space. They want to see their local downtowns not chainified with Wendy’s dollar store Target every three miles. And they realize that if they support local businesses, that means there’s a vibrant downtown and that means higher home values. So there’s self-interest involved.
Yeah.
⁓ I do believe, and that’s why we’re really all in on this business model, that this is a time and place for what we do. There’s been a couple businesses like this in Europe, but nothing like the United States. People want to be connected to local stores. They’re getting tired of getting cheap stuff that’s broken and having to deal with it or packages missed or not knowing, you know…
Yeah.
what’s going on. Communication is the key to success in any relationship, including professionally. We do a really good job with that with Trellus. But feeling good about shopping local. People say they want to do it, but the reality is there has to be some value. Yeah, the value is what you’re getting, getting things quickly. And now at scale, there’ll be no reason to not shop at a small business. So that’s why we have Trellus.
It’s difficult. And it’s difficult sometimes. Yeah.
Cool. Can you share a recent success story? Maybe a business that transformed its sales or customer retention thanks to Trellus?
Maybe a different section of the corner, it feels like more presenting than short.
Yeah, let me go back to that story of this guy Johnny Brett. His name is John. He was a finance guy. He got sick of the rat race. I met him at a farmer’s market three years ago. He was leery of trying and then he was doing the deliveries himself and was like, can’t do this. Working hard does not mean you’re working smart and being profitable. So he dipped his toe in with Trellus and then he…
Yeah.
Decided to use us for his deliveries. Then he decided to join our platform for ⁓ e-commerce now he drives people to our our site for his e-commerce and Just before this call two orders came in from random people who want his delicious breads and we’re helping him scale without Money out of pocket before we’d have to hire his own website developer. We’d have to have his own logistics team You’d have to have somebody who knew how to run the tech
Fantastic! Yeah.
Now he can just make his delicious breads and croissants and use us to help grow his business. So those are the kind of folks. One last quick thing, wine countries struggling in California. There has been a lower tourism rate since what’s going on politically. There’s been fires that have hurt some of the farms. People aren’t drinking as much wine as they needed to. They’ve embraced us with open arms. So having the ability to
Yep. Fantastic.
Mm-hmm.
buy directly from a local, any local winery you want on the West Coast, will be a game changer for these folks and for consumers. As opposed to having to run into a liquor store, you can get something straight from a micro ⁓ brewery or winery. It’s unique and it’s exciting. So there’s so much opportunity, there’s so many businesses that need help desperately. And that’s why we’re in what we’re doing.
Mm.
Finally, what advice would you give to entrepreneurs or local business owners looking to stay competitive and dominate fast online retail?
to you on some premieres.
Well, the local entrepreneurs who want to do what we’re doing, it always takes longer and costs more. It’s hard. It is not easy to start from scratch and have a business now with 20 full-time employees and 100 drivers and growing, now going by coastal and raising capital. It’s a lot. So nothing worthwhile is easy, but if you’re to do the hard work and sleepless nights, then you should start a business like that. For the merchants, you’ve got to try new things.
Yeah. Yeah.
I’m not saying we’re your answer, but I know that we are. But if you don’t try new things and give it a shot and just hope things change and stick your head in the sand and keep your AOL and don’t have a website and wanting people to come in your store and wonder why, you know, the strip malls are vacant, then you’re going to be a victim of your own circumstances. You’ve got to embrace some form of tech or new opportunity and give it a shot.
Bye.
And if it works, then double down. And we believe we’ve got a very unique recipe just for the small business owner. You can’t be anybody but a small business owner on our platform, no national chains or corporately traded companies. And the model is resonating as just a function of time and growing.
Mm-hmm.
Very cool. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing how Trellus has been helping local businesses thrive in a same day delivery and just being affordable. Your insights in logistics, innovation and supporting small businesses is incredible and we really value it. And thanks again for everyone being here and listening to our podcast. See you on the next episode of Growth Challenges for Manufacturers.
Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing.
and just being affordable. ⁓ Your insights on logistics, innovation, supporting small businesses is incredible and very valuable. And thanks again for everyone being here and listening to our podcast. you on the next episode of Growth Challenges for Manufacturers.
Thank you, Katherine. It was great to be here.
Thank you so much.
Local businesses face an uphill battle competing with e-commerce giants like Amazon and big-box retailers. But what if there was a way to level the playing field—offering the same convenience and speed that customers expect, without sacrificing the personal touch that makes small businesses special?
That's exactly what Trellus set out to solve. In a recent episode of Growth Challenges for Manufacturers and How to Overcome Them from MacRAE'S, Adam Haber, co-founder and CEO of Trellus, discussed how his company is empowering independent retailers with affordable same-day delivery
The inspiration for Trellus came from a simple, relatable frustration. After long days commuting three hours from Manhattan, Adam would receive calls from his wife asking him to pick up last-minute items—a toy for a birthday party, flowers, a bottle of wine. "I'm like, I don't want to do that. I just worked 12 hours and commuted three hours," Adam recalls. "Why isn't there an app or marketplace where I can literally tap a mouse or click a button and have things magically at my house in about an hour or two hours?"
While same-day delivery existed for food through apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats, and for big chains like Walmart and Target, independent small businesses were left behind. Local florists, toy stores, gift shops, bakeries, pharmacies, and liquor stores—the backbone of communities where you know the business owner's name—had no affordable way to offer this service.
After interviewing about 150 merchants, Adam discovered two critical needs: affordable logistics and a way to be driven orders without getting ripped off. That became the foundation of Trellus.
Contact us to explore how we can help your business grow.
