A marketplace that refuses to take a cut
Walk into wholesale and someone is standing at the door with their hand out - a distributor, a platform, a middleman taking five, ten, sometimes thirty cents on the dollar. Arnold Engel built Tundra to remove that person from the room entirely.
Today Engel is co-founder and CEO of Tundra, a wholesale marketplace where independent retailers buy from brands directly and the platform never skims the transaction. More than two million products sit ready to ship. Over thirty thousand retailers buy through it. The promise is almost suspiciously plain - the best price, on time, with free shipping - and the business model behind it is the thing competitors keep tripping over: Tundra makes money on premium add-ons like faster delivery and order insurance, not on the sale itself.
It is a deceptively simple idea wrapped around a stubborn principle. The Engels decided early that they would never charge a commission, and the entire company flows downstream from that one decision. Suppliers can quote their floor price because nobody is clipping the ticket. Buyers with a single storefront get pricing once reserved for chains with hundreds.
The wholesale market is set up to benefit big businesses, with other platforms and distributors charging anywhere from 5 percent to 30 percent commission. That can be particularly pronounced for small businesses.Arnold Engel, to TechCrunch, 2019
By the count
Built by people who felt the friction first
Before Tundra there was Vox Supply Chain, the global logistics company Engel ran from 2009 to 2018. Moving goods across more than a hundred countries is a tour of every inefficiency in commerce - opaque pricing, clumsy ordering, intermediaries quietly skimming ten to thirty percent off both ends. Most operators learn to live with it. Engel and his wife Katie decided to go build the alternative instead.
They started Tundra in 2017 as a husband-and-wife team: Arnold as CEO, Katie as COO. The structure says something about the company. This was not a pair of outsiders chasing a hot category; it was two operators who had stared at the problem for years and finally had the leverage to fix it.
Engel's resume reads like a setup for exactly this move. An A.B. in economics from Dartmouth. Consulting at McKinsey & Company from 2007. Then nearly a decade running a supply chain at scale. He arrived at the marketplace question not as a theorist but as someone who had already paid the tolls.
We would never take a commission from any transactions on our platform.Arnold Engel, Tundra founding principle
From consulting desk to founder's chair
The philosophy, unedited
We're focused on the fundamentals - guaranteed best prices and guaranteed on-time delivery.
Many buyers on Tundra have Main Street addresses.
To put $1 billion dollars back into the pockets of independent businesses over the next five years.
The wholesale market is set up to benefit big businesses... that can be particularly pronounced for small businesses.
Three ideas doing all the work
No toll booth
Zero commission is not a discount - it is the architecture. Remove the cut, and suppliers can quote their real floor price.
Revenue elsewhere
Tundra earns on premium services: faster shipping, order insurance, customs clearance. The sale stays free.
Main Street first
The whole company is pointed at independent retailers - the shops a few percentage points of margin can make or break.
A few things that stick
- Tundra is named for one of the planet's harshest landscapes - a fitting nod to the brutal terrain of independent retail.
- Engel ran a global supply chain before he ran a tech company, which is why the unglamorous parts - shipping times, delivery guarantees - sit at the center of the pitch.
- The company's bet is counterintuitive: give away the thing everyone else charges for, and make money on the conveniences around it.
- It is a family operation - Arnold as CEO, Katie as COO - two people who lived the problem before they sold the solution.