He spent two decades fixing other people's warehouses. Then he got tired of waiting and built his own.
Donny Salazar runs MasonHub, the fulfillment company he started in 2018 because he could never hire one good enough. That is the whole origin story, and he says it without flinching: across years of scaling fast-growing brands, he kept looking for a logistics partner who cared about the customer as much as he did. He never found one. So he wrote the spec himself.
MasonHub is not a warehouse with a website bolted on. It is software first - a headless, API-driven platform that lets beauty, wellness, and fashion brands plug fulfillment straight into however they already sell. Inventory, order management, shipping, returns, the unglamorous middle of e-commerce, all wired into one system. The boxes still ship from real buildings staffed by real people. The difference is what happens before the box moves.
We built the fulfillment company and product we always dreamed of.
Most logistics founders grew up around forklifts. Salazar started in lipstick. After earning his MBA at Stanford, he ran marketing initiatives at Revlon - the kind of glossy, brand-building work that sits about as far from a loading dock as retail gets. Then he found the part of the business that actually fascinated him: the machinery underneath. The systems that decide whether the thing you ordered shows up, on time, undamaged, and ready to make you come back.
At Gilt Groupe between 2008 and 2012, he climbed through operations roles - Director, then Senior Director of Distribution and Supply Chain, then VP of Global Customer Experience. This was Gilt at its most feverish, the flash-sale era when a daily email could empty a warehouse by lunch. His team built the supply chain that let revenue climb from $10 million to north of $500 million. Hyper-growth is a polite word for chaos, and he learned to operate inside it.
Then he ran the chaos for himself. COO at Flight Club, the sneaker marketplace where authentication and condition are everything and a single mislabeled box is a small scandal. SVP of Operations at Chloe+Isabel, the jewelry brand. By the time he founded MasonHub, he had stress-tested fulfillment across apparel, footwear, jewelry, and beauty. He had also collected a long list of things that were broken.
"Throughout my experience scaling businesses, I struggled to find a partner that could support a fast-growing brand and cared about the customer experience as much as I do. With MasonHub, we're building the company and team we always wanted to work with."
Salazar's thesis is blunt: the brand that wins is the one standing wherever the customer happens to be reaching for a card.
"It's no longer about being a pure-play e-commerce brand, it's about being wherever your customer wants to purchase, whether that's in store, online or BOPIS."
"In order to support omnichannel retail, you need a strong OMS to handle your allocation across multiple channels." The order management system is the thing that turns one inventory pool into many storefronts.
The top challenge he names for fashion: "how to marry technology with the physical." Plenty of brands haven't solved it because they never invested in the tech to begin with.
MasonHub was built remote-first, and Salazar is allergic to the startup theater of perks. He'd rather invest in how people actually work together than in another snack wall.
Illustrative - based on Salazar's own description of MasonHub's values.
We're less about snacks and foosball at the office and more about how you engage the team.
We are highly transparent and collaborative, and no questions are stupid questions.
Ask Salazar what he wears and the answer arrives pre-assembled: "Acne jeans, James Perse shirts and Common Projects or Vans sneakers." Same thing today, same thing tomorrow. It is the quiet tell of an operations brain - a man who has audited enough warehouses to know that every decision you don't have to make is one more you can spend on the order that has to ship right.
The same instinct shows up in what earns his money. "Quality is the No. 1 thing that wins my loyalty," he says, and if a brand keeps "giving me fresh new styles that are relevant, that definitely wins my loyalty." He built a company around getting the boring, physical promise right, because he is exactly the customer who notices when it's wrong.
Started in marketing at Revlon before pivoting into the operations world he'd eventually build a company on.
Co-founded MasonHub with CTO Christopher Hazlett, a veteran of Transfix, LinkedIn, and Gilt.
Opened MasonHub bicoastal from the start - because customers don't wait for the next time zone.
First distribution center: nearly 100,000 square feet in LA's Inland Empire.
Early customers included activewear label Carbon38 and luxury marketplace 11 Honoré.
Holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, General Management.
I struggled to find a partner that cared about the customer experience as much as I do. So we built the one we always wanted to work with.