Ricky Choi

Ricky Choi runs a company called Outerspace, and if you have not spent time in the third-party logistics business, the name will read like a startup joke. It is not a joke, exactly. Choi picked it because the legacy fulfillment industry organizes itself around geography, freeway exits, port distances, and pallet racks in Ontario, California. He wanted to organize a fulfillment company around brands. He picked a name that pointed away from a map.

Outerspace is now a roughly 200,000 square foot campus in Carlstadt, New Jersey, plus additional facilities that push the operation across Pennsylvania and Arizona. The company recently expanded to a bicoastal footprint. It employs around 170 people. It has raised roughly $40 million, most recently a $30 million Series B in May 2022, led by Prysm Capital. The clients are direct-to-consumer brands that want their unboxing experience taken seriously, their kits assembled without complaint, and their inventory counted with something close to accuracy.

The interesting sentence in a Choi interview is almost always the same one. He says the warehouse is the last touch point. He means: whatever the marketing team does at the top of the funnel, whatever the site designer does in the checkout flow, whatever the customer service person promises in a chat window, the final impression a customer gets is a cardboard box, opened at a kitchen counter, at some hour, alone. He runs a company because he thinks that box is under-invested-in.

He is not entirely wrong. DTC brands have spent a decade obsessing over site copy, ad units, and packaging renderings while outsourcing the actual pack to whoever quoted the lowest per-unit rate. Outerspace's pitch is that the pack is the brand. The kit is the brand. The insert card is the brand. Choi built a company premised on the idea that a brand is not really a brand until it survives contact with a picker, a printer, and a corrugated box.

Before Outerspace, Choi co-founded Nice Laundry. This was 2013, an era when it was still possible to launch a category-defining apparel brand with a Kickstarter and a good sense of humor. Nice Laundry sold premium socks, and later underwear, with more design attitude than the drawer usually contained. The launch campaign raised over $119,000 and, according to press coverage at the time, set the Kickstarter record for the most opening-day backers in fashion. That was the entry ticket.

Nice Laundry became a durable little DTC brand of the sort that got covered in gift guides and mens' style columns for years. It also became, quietly, Choi's education in fulfillment. Running a sock company means running a shipping operation with unusually low forgiveness margins. The unit economics do not tolerate a lot of pick errors. The customer does not tolerate a bag of six socks arriving with five. Nice Laundry, in other words, taught Choi what he later built Outerspace to fix.

He has said the trigger was frustration. He kept switching 3PLs because the ones he could find would not bend. It was always no, you cannot do this, no, you cannot do that. The rigidity was not a matter of technology so much as culture, and Choi took the culture personally. Nice Laundry stayed, and Choi and co-founder Phil Moldavski built Outerspace in 2019 to say yes.

The single detail that tells you the most about Choi's approach: he brought Red Antler into the warehouse. Red Antler is a Brooklyn brand agency known for the identity work behind consumer brands you have heard of. They do not usually do 3PLs, because 3PLs do not usually think a Brooklyn brand agency is a productive line item. Choi disagreed. He wanted the picking floor, the box design, the shift signage, the operator experience, and the brand identity to feel like the same idea. The Red Antler engagement is the sort of thing an operator does when he is willing to be laughed at by his peers for a couple of quarters in exchange for a company that does not look like anyone else's.

This is a small tell about temperament. The obvious way to run a 3PL is to compete on price and utilization. The Choi way is to compete on how a brand feels about handing over the entire back end. The obvious way is cheaper. The Choi way is more defensible.