No one ever said launching a new company, particularly one with an untested business model, would be easy. And it hasn’t been! But with a lot of support, a great team of colleagues, great supporters, and a little luck, Kickfurther has evolved from an idea to a firmly established funding provider in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry.
Kickfurther was formed ten years ago because of a cash-flow problem facing my own CPG merchandising company. After Dodd-Frank, legislation ostensibly designed to prevent “too big to fail” moments in the finance industry, we saw the largest consolidation in the finance industry in history. Originations from small and medium banks tanked and they were absorbed by the biggest banks getting even bigger.
This created an absolute dearth of finance for small and medium businesses, the kinds of clients that small community banks were well designed to serve, but weren’t worth the time to underwrite for the growing megabanks. They weren’t interested in making loans to a business my size, and factoring services wanted to eat too much into our margin. I was able to take out a personal loan, but that wasn’t a long-term solution and I didn’t want to do an equity raise just to fund inventory runs.
This was during a zero interest rate policy environment and it seemed like a massive disconnect in the market that my money was earning 0% sitting in a bank account but my profitable growing business was being charged north of 50% for inventory funding. I saw an opportunity to provide a great funding solution to product entrepreneurs while also creating access for anyone interested in earning profit in the world of product goods through a digital-first inventory consignment marketplace.
Ten Years Later
Ten years in, Kickfurther is still the world’s first and only inventory funding consignment marketplace. We have funded more than $300 million in inventory across over 2,300 consignments. One of our early learnings is that if our marketplace was going to be successful, we needed to create a process to review and qualify CPG companies.
That process developed over the years from an initial checklist, to a scorecard heuristic, to what we have today, the Kickfurther Metrics Model (KMM), a machine learning tool that has greatly improved our ability to review and qualify businesses. We’re proud of the KMM, as it has become the core of our qualification process, and continually increases in both its efficiency and predictive power.
Moving forward
It took ten years, but Kickfurther is now deeply rooted and the future looks bright. More than $160 of the $300 million funded occurred in the last two years and we’re on track to fund over $100M in inventory in 2024 alone. We are the only organization offering inventory on consignment to the market segment we operate in, the best cash flow alternative to the merchant cash advance solutions that plague our market.
At the same time, we’re continuously improving the KMM to attempt to ensure positive outcomes for our users and client businesses.
We believe we are currently in a position to sustainably build toward our vision. That vision is informed by our history that’s steeped in supply chain management. I’ve seen how much wealth has been created in trade over the years and we believe that trade has historically been one of the greatest wealth-creation engines in history. Inventory is the physical asset that underpins trade, and the trade of physical goods only continues to grow.
Our vision is to use the best technology to build the world’s first and best digital exchange where users and businesses form a partnership through the medium of inventory and both profit as a result. Our success creates unprecedented direct access to one of the most liquid, high-turn and vast classes of assets: physical goods inventory.
So, congratulations Kickfurther on its ten-year anniversary! Looking back, it’s amazing what we’ve accomplished, and reflecting on everything it took to get here. Looking forward, our plan is to fundamentally change the way the world thinks about inventory
