BufferBox

» see bufferbox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The first BufferBox went into the Student Life Centre at the University of Waterloo in January 2012. It was a wall of lockers with a screen on it. Jay Shah and Aditya Bali started the company with Mike McCauley, all of them out of Waterloo engineering, and the whole thing had been a fourth-year design project the year before.

Signing up got you a BufferBox address. You used it as the shipping address on an online order, and when the parcel landed in a kiosk an email arrived with a one-time unlock code. What it solved was the missed-delivery notice, which in 2012 was still a piece of card wedged into a door frame. The company took the 2012 Velocity Venture Fund and went through Y Combinator. In early November 2012 it cut a deal to put kiosks in GO Transit stations around Toronto, and it had testing under way with Walmart Canada.

Google announced the acquisition on 30 November 2012. Terms were not disclosed, and TechCrunch put the figure above $17 million against roughly $3 million the founders had raised from angel investors. Google said it intended to keep the BufferBox brand for the foreseeable future, and in September 2013 extended the service into San Francisco.

~ the dossier ~

~ the co-op school ~

Waterloo is a co-op school, which means its engineering undergraduates spend alternating terms inside real companies and come back with opinions about how those companies work. A parcel locker in the student union building is what that produces. It was a working machine serving people who genuinely had the problem, installed in the building where the designers ate lunch.

~ the google year ~

Google kept its word about the brand for the whole of 2013. The kiosks stayed BufferBox and so did the site. The San Francisco launch that September was the only real expansion under the new owner. Amazon Lockers were the competitor everybody named, and the deal had been read at the time as Google answering them.

Then Google changed what it wanted from the team. Shopping Express, the same-day delivery service it was running in the Bay Area, needed logistics people more than it needed lockers. Co-founder Jay Shah later told Communitech that in hindsight the sale to Google might not have been the right path.

~ the last pickup ~

The email went out on 21 February 2014 and new signups stopped the same day. The warehouses stopped accepting packages on 31 March. The last day anybody could collect a parcel was 21 April.

The wording members got was that the company had made the difficult decision to begin winding down the standalone BufferBox service, and that the team's learnings and technology would go into future Google Shopping products like Google Shopping Express. The notice that reached customers came from BufferBox's own blog, and the FAQ it sent them to sat in a Google support subdirectory that today redirects to Google's generic help home.

~ what the lockers became ~

Google Shopping Express became Google Express and died in 2019. Amazon Lockers are in supermarkets and apartment lobbies across several continents. Parcel lockers won as an idea. The company that installed the first one in a Canadian student union building lasted under seventeen months as a Google property.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »