Spotlight: Mantoria - Differentiating End-to-End in a Crowded Market

According to Florent, the current market couldn’t be more competitive. Still, in his view, price alone should never be the determining factor for companies selecting a logistics partner.

“There's no doubt it's a super competitive market,” he said. “There are a lot of companies out there that we compete against, and initially, when you talk to a client a lot of the discussion revolves around price. Even though we know that we have to offer cost effective solutions to our clients, we focus on companies that don't just look at price, but at the overall value we add to their supply chains.”

How Mantoria adds value

After roughly 15 years in business, adding value is the name of the game for Mantoria. Florent explained, “Our whole idea is to offer a solution to our clients from origin, wherever that may be. This includes moving their goods from origin to dock or origin to door and handling every single step of the way in between including final mile. Many established brands do not want to rely on various parties to achieve this, and recognize that there are huge benefits with the streamlined process that we offer.”

Tying in e-Commerce to an end-to-end service offering

With the recent explosion in e-Commerce, how they’re handling those steps is what’s beginning to truly set the company apart from the pack. Mr. Bojarski brought up the example of established e-commerce brands  who might have otherwise used Amazon, but don’t want their products arriving at a customer’s door in Amazon branded packaging.

“We started focusing on brands that want to work through a third party, but don’t want to work through Amazon FBA services. Why? Perhaps they don’t want Amazon branding on their boxes, require specific value added services, or want a more personalized approach that better reflects their brand. We’re offering these companies tailored services that Amazon just won’t do.”

Innovative technology to streamline customer experiences

Backing up the company’s ability to provide Amazon-style services is their drive to incorporate technological innovation into the way they do business. For Mantoria, not only are technological advancements in robotics and A.I. helping streamline the customer experience, but they’re also helping the company run more efficiently.

“I think for us we recognize that not only can technology make the experience for our clients much better,” Florent said, “it can also make us way more efficient internally.”

As an example, he pointed out a recent investment the company made in a robotic palletizer, a step taken in response to labour shortages during the pandemic of 2020.

“We realized it was very hard to get people for warehouse labor jobs. So, we looked at robotics to help us with that, and in one of our facilities, invested in a robot to help unload and palletize  containers. Now, we’ve tested it for a few years and have realized that wow, we’ve achieved a pretty good savings in terms of efficiency, costs, and storage capacity.”

Innovative Section 321 services

Another avenue the company is exploring to help smaller e-commerce players level the playing field is through the development of Section 321 services. These are designed to help companies generate big savings on duty. How this works, is that companies that import to the U.S., route their incoming arrivals to Canada, rather than straight south. Once in Canada, the larger shipments are broken down and re-shipped as individual orders.

“What Section 321 allows companies to do in a perfectly legal manner is save on US duty. So instead of importing to the U.S. at duty rates that can be 15-20% or more, we route shipments through Canada, unload in one of our warehouses, manage the inventory and fulfill individual orders to U.S. consumers from Canada.

The benefit is that our clients can save huge amounts on US duty, since individual orders under USD 800 can be imported to the U.S. duty free. For companies

that do a lot of importing to the U.S. it can mean massive savings—sometimes in the millions of dollars."

For Mantoria, it all comes down to clearing a pathway to growth by focusing on innovation that helps their customers achieve their goals. We’re excited to see what the future brings.