Alexi Suvacioglu Learned the Business by Packing the Boxes

The garage contained the whole company. Customer support lived there. Fulfillment lived there. So did the founders, at least for enough hours that the distinction between executive work and packing work became mostly theoretical. Alexi Suvacioglu remembers that first version of Because as a place where he, co-founder Luca Gualco and the earliest employees did everything themselves. Orders went out because they put them in boxes. Customers were understood because somebody picked up the phone.

Years later, with the company selling online, through Amazon and on shelves at four national retailers, Suvacioglu still treats those days as operating instruction. A founder who hires away every unfamiliar function too soon, he has argued, risks becoming a spectator inside the company he started. The garage was not a charming origin myth. It was a compressed education in what could go wrong between a click and a delivery.

“You need to pack the boxes yourself and talk to customers to gain an intimate understanding of your company.”Alexi Suvacioglu, reflecting on Because's early days

This is the useful tension in Suvacioglu's career. His résumé is full of scalable systems: technology consulting, online advertising, automated coupon testing, ecommerce and data. His management philosophy begins with an insistence on the small and manual. The software matters. So does opening the damaged parcel.

Before the boxes, there were expired coupons

Suvacioglu grew up in Italy in what he has described as a tight-knit family. He remembers homemade pasta, crowded tables, loud voices and very few forbidden topics. He later studied Geography at King's College London, a field concerned with how people, systems and places connect. It is tempting to read the rest of his career as another kind of mapping exercise: locating friction, tracing incentives and figuring out where a customer gets lost.

He began at Accenture in 2001, working on marketing and finance projects for consumer-goods clients. By 2008 he was at eBay, where he moved through internet-marketing roles and led the North American AdCommerce business. The job came with a profit-and-loss statement, not merely a feature roadmap. Advertising had to perform as a product and as a business.

Then came two founder chapters in quick succession. Oohilove sold designer accessories through an entertainment-shopping model and was acquired in 2011. ZenDeals attacked one of ecommerce's familiar tiny betrayals: the coupon code that fails at checkout. Its system used automation to collect and test offers, and Suvacioglu is named on patent applications covering online coupon and deal mechanics. RetailMeNot acquired the company in 2013, after which he stayed as a director.

The products changed, but the question remained stable. What makes a customer hesitate, lose trust or abandon the transaction? At Yewno, where he became chief product officer in 2015, the subject was information overload. At Because, founded with Gualco in 2017, it was a neglected personal-care shopping experience for older adults. Each business started where the existing system asked the customer to do too much work.

Listening became the product system

Suvacioglu and Gualco had met at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Both had grown up in Italian families where generations stayed close. When they started Because, they were not building for a younger version of themselves, the default reflex behind many direct-to-consumer brands. They were building for people in their own families and for a generation that most startup pitch decks treated as an afterthought.

The direct-to-consumer model gave the new company something incumbents could not easily buy: a direct conversation. Calls about product choice, delivery, packaging and reorders formed a stream of unfiltered research. The customer was not a demographic label in a quarterly deck. The customer was the person on the line, waiting while somebody found the answer.

That closeness could be humbling. In one early fulfillment mishap, the company accidentally shipped roughly 2,000 items to a single customer. She took the enormous delivery in good humor. The story survives because it is funny, but its lesson is operational. Recurring commerce is a chain of mundane promises. Pack size, address logic, inventory and support all become part of the brand the instant one of them fails.

Suvacioglu's public advice to founders reflects that experience. Listen without rushing to interrupt. Hire people you admire and who are better than you. Choose the vital few over the trivial many, an idea he credits to Greg McKeown's Essentialism. His favorite short rule is even plainer: “It's always about the people.”

These can sound like agreeable management slogans until they are translated into expense and behavior. Listening means leaving space in a conversation when urgency says to fill it. Staying close means doing work that does not look like CEO work. Choosing the vital few means declining plausible projects, not merely bad ones. The discipline is in what the sentence costs.

The internet brand walked back into the store

Because grew up online, where subscriptions made replenishment predictable and every interaction produced data. The old direct-to-consumer script might have stopped there. Physical retail was supposed to be the slow world being disrupted: limited shelves, expensive placement and distance from the buyer.

Customers had a less ideological concern. Sometimes they wanted to buy in person, on the same trip where they handled the rest of their errands. Access mattered more than channel purity. Because moved onto Amazon, then into CVS and Walmart. In April 2026, it announced placement in Walgreens and Target, completing a national four-chain footprint.

The move did not erase the direct business. It used it. Years of online orders had shown the team which products, formats and price points earned repeat demand. Ecommerce functioned as a laboratory; retail became distribution for the answers that survived the test. The company did not return to the shelf empty-handed. It arrived carrying evidence from more than one million customers.

That sequence helps explain why Suvacioglu's path is more coherent than its list of industries suggests. Coupons, ads, knowledge software and personal care all taught some version of the same lesson: information becomes valuable when it reduces a real person's uncertainty. A dashboard can summarize the pattern. It cannot substitute for noticing it.

A domino run lasts ten seconds

Suvacioglu once wrote about spending hours with his five-year-old son arranging dominoes, only to knock the whole construction down in seconds. The ritual reminded him that entrepreneurship contains a large element of luck, and luck is the part no founder controls. If the only pleasure is the ending, most of the experience becomes a waiting room.

His career has supplied plenty of endings that look clean in retrospect: two acquisitions, a Stanford MBA, a senior role at eBay, a $35 million funding round for Because in 2021, a national retail rollout. The lived version includes the time before each one, when an outcome was merely possible. It includes failed coupon codes, support calls, packing tape and a pallet that went wildly astray.

There is a specific temperament behind that record: ambitious about scale, suspicious of distance, comfortable learning in public and willing to let an unglamorous detail carry the lesson. Suvacioglu has said he wants Because to become a global, trusted company for older adults. The size of that aspiration makes the garage principle more important, not less. Scale multiplies whatever the founders understood at the beginning, including their blind spots.

A founder's real moat may be the work they did before anyone thought to call it strategy.The garage lesson

So the most revealing artifact in the story is not the funding announcement or the shelf photograph. It is the box. A box forces every grand claim into physical form. The right item must be inside. It must arrive at the right place. A person must open it and feel that the company understood the assignment. In the earliest days of Because, Suvacioglu could see that entire promise at arm's length.

The company is larger now. The promise is the same. Learn close to the customer. Keep the details within reach. Enjoy placing the dominoes, because the public moment when they fall is very brief. The work between milestones is where judgment, trust and the company itself are actually made.