Cart.com, a Houston-based startup providing end-to-end e-commerce services, has acquired OceanX, the wholly owned fulfillment operations arm of Guthy-Renker.
Cart.com President Ilias Simpson said the OceanX acquisition not only increases the company’s fulfillment warehouse network, but also expands the e-commerce firm into new market segments.
“It’s really a perfect marriage with the two organizations in terms of being a complementary offering,” Simpson told FreightWaves in an interview. “OceanX has a deep breadth of health and beauty brands that they work with, and at Cart.com, we’ve kind of been more heavily tilted towards apparel and shoes, and then we have our life science business, but we’ve been trying to break into the health and cosmetics, beauty space.”
Founded in 2016, OceanX is headquartered in El Segundo, California. The company is an e-commerce fulfillment provider for beauty and wellness brands.
OceanX is a division of Santa Monica, California-based Guthy Ranker, one of the world’s largest direct-response marketing companies.
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Through the acquisition, Cart.com will gain clients such as Meaningful Beauty, The Body Firm, Smileactives and Westmore Beauty.
“So with OceanX being so deep there, and with their Guthy-Renker connections and everything that that brings, we felt like this was an opportunity for us to not only add some additional footprint and some additional talent from the OceanX team, but also to basically add another vertical to our organization,” Simpson said.
As part of the transaction, 200 OceanX employees will join the Cart.com team. Cart.com will also add two facilities totaling over 600,000 square feet to its network. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
The facilities include a West Coast distribution hub in Southern California and a facility near Columbus, Ohio. With the acquisition, Cart.com’s network now has 17 omnichannel fulfillment and distribution centers totaling almost 10 million square feet.
Cart.com also has fulfillment centers in Memphis, Tennessee; Salt Lake City; and North Texas. It now has over 1,600 employees.
“This helps us expand further into the West Coast. This will help our existing customer base as well. By increasing our footprint, we can increase our reach from a transportation perspective and reduce transit time for our existing clients,” Simpson said. “Now we can offer solutions where we can cover the entire United States and get to their customers within a day. It’s a huge advantage.”
Cart.com was founded in 2020. The company provides the physical and digital infrastructure for brands to fulfill their supply chain operations across channels, locations and destinations. The company offers logistics and fulfillment solutions, as well as software and operations services.
The OceanX acquisition is Cart.com’s ninth since 2021.
U.S. e-commerce sales from January through September totaled $868 billion, a 6% year-over-year increase, according to data from the Census Bureau.
Simpson said a recent federal appeals court ruling upholding a ban on TikTok in the U.S. could affect e-commerce sellers across the country.
“We have customers like PacSun who are selling on TikTok, and have TikTok as an additional channel,” Simpson said.
PacSun is a Newport Beach, California-based retail brand that sells clothing, footwear and accessories.
“Our software actually helps PacSun with that. That’s one of the benefits of Cart.com. Having kind of a unified commerce solution with the software on the front end, the fulfillment, final mile on the back end, we can do things like help brands who are looking to increase the number of channels that that they want to sell through, whether it be Amazon, Walmart, TikTok,” Simpson said.
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