Rizwan Kermalli and the arithmetic of a small parcel

A courier driver meets a business at its least theoretical moment. Something has to leave one place and arrive at another. The recipient is waiting. Whatever the sales presentation promised, the parcel now requires a door, an address and a person willing to carry it. Rizwan Kermalli began his logistics career doing that work in New York in the 1980s. Years later, he would build a company around the difficulties that accumulate before a driver ever makes the pickup.

His idea had an appealing piece of arithmetic at its center. A small merchant sends a small number of parcels. A collection of small merchants sends a much more interesting number. Put their volume together, and the conversation with a carrier changes. A shop that would struggle to command attention on its own can participate in a larger commercial relationship.

Kermalli’s eShipper grew from that proposition. The technology made the arrangement easier to use, but the arrangement itself required someone to understand both sides of the counter. The merchant wanted affordable access. The carrier needed a workable way to serve that merchant. Kermalli made a business out of introducing them, then taking on more of the work between the introduction and the delivery.

The route before the platform

In 1999, he founded Canada Worldwide Services. Its work included freight forwarding, warehousing, customs brokerage and distribution. Those are useful words to slow down over. Each describes a different obstacle between an item and its destination: finding transport, finding space, crossing a border, getting goods into the right hands.

The founding preceded eShipper’s launch by six years. That interval gives the story a different rhythm from the familiar account of someone building an application and then looking for an industry to use it. Kermalli was already working inside logistics. The online platform would be a new way of organizing relationships and services he understood through the business.

His public education record reaches further back. He attended Shaaban Robert Secondary School from 1980 to 1982. His LinkedIn profile lists English and Kiswahili. These are small details beside a corporate timeline, but they restore some proportion to it. A founder arrives at a launch date with years already behind him. The date is where the company’s clock starts, rather than the beginning of the person.

A seat at the carrier’s table

In 2002, Kermalli brought his intermediary concept to FedEx and UPS. FedEx saw a way to reach customers through the arrangement; other major operators subsequently joined. His explanation of the relationship was unusually direct: “we can perform customer service for them.” A short sentence, with a fair amount of the business tucked inside it.

Consider the two parties. The small business needs a shipping service often enough for its price to matter. Yet its individual volume may offer a carrier little reason to build a special relationship. The carrier already has the network. Reaching and supporting many small accounts is a separate job. An intermediary can bring those accounts together and handle part of the service burden.

This is where the arithmetic becomes organizational. Combining volume creates negotiating weight. Helping customers use the service gives the combined volume somewhere useful to go. Both jobs matter. A discount that nobody can navigate is an oddly elaborate ornament.

The 2005 platform put rate comparison and booking online. A commercial relationship could now be reached through a screen. For Kermalli, the move connected his earlier logistics work with a different way of buying it. The person sending a parcel no longer needed to reproduce every carrier conversation to make a choice.

The software has company

The temptation with an online business is to make the screen the main character. In Kermalli’s case, that misses some of the cast. Carrier partners, customer service colleagues and the merchants using the system all have to make the transaction work. A button can request a pickup; the rest of the arrangement must make the request mean something.

His colleagues’ descriptions offer another view of how he operates. On LinkedIn, Tania Fraser recommends him as a boss who listens to ideas and treats people with respect. Abdulaziz Dewjee emphasizes his attention to detail, customer service and appetite for growth. These are their assessments of working with him, and they point toward a founder whose day-to-day relationships deserve space beside the dates.

There is a practical connection between the two. A company selling access to other companies’ networks has to maintain relationships in several directions. It must be useful to the carrier and understandable to the merchant. It also needs employees who can hear a customer’s difficulty and translate it into something the organization can solve. The people doing that work are part of what a customer is buying.

When the family joins the conversation

In early 2024, Kermalli appeared in a two-part interview on Elaine’s Kitchen Table. His son Imran and son-in-law Imtiaz joined him. The host, entrepreneur Elaine Tan Comeau, had used eShipper for more than ten years. That makes for a particular sort of business conversation: a customer with a long memory talking to the family behind the service.

The episodes carried a title about treating customers like family. eShipper sponsored the podcast, and Comeau’s account of her experience was plainly enthusiastic. The family relationships themselves are concrete. eShipper identifies Imran Kermalli as chief marketing officer and Imtiaz Kermali as chief revenue officer. Rizwan is founder and CEO. Mo Datoo is chief operations officer.

Those titles mark different responsibilities inside a company with a shared history. Marketing has to explain the proposition. Revenue leadership has to turn interest into a working customer relationship. Operations has to deliver what was offered. The founder’s original insight can travel through all three departments, acquiring detail along the way.

There is something pleasantly literal about a family business appearing at a kitchen table. Corporate biographies tend to compress people into titles. Here, the relationships remain visible. The business has people who knew one another before the interview began, and a customer who had been watching their work for years.

The box acquires a back room

A parcel booking is one piece of a merchant’s workload. Stock has to sit somewhere before it can be dispatched. Orders have to be prepared. A business selling through a marketplace has requirements that reach beyond finding a carrier. Follow a shipment backward and you eventually arrive at shelves, packing benches and inventory decisions.

Kermalli’s responsibilities now extend into that territory. AMZ Prep lists him as president and board member, with responsibility for strategic direction, corporate governance, long-term growth and partnerships. Its founder is Blair Forrest. Kermalli’s role is a useful illustration of a later stage in his career: helping direct a fulfillment organization alongside the shipping business he founded.

Governance is a quieter word than launch. It concerns the decisions that let an organization keep functioning as its responsibilities increase. Partnership strategy is similarly easy to pass over until a customer needs two separate systems to behave as though they have met before. These are extensions of the relationship work that runs through his earlier carrier pitch.

The broader pattern is one of following the merchant’s work. Once a company helps someone send an order, it is close enough to see the tasks around that order. Some belong in software. Some need a warehouse. Others require an experienced person to arrange the handoff. Kermalli’s career now touches several of those places.

A longer route, the same question

In 2022, eShipper and the UAE-headquartered Transworld Group signed a memorandum concerning a proposed joint venture in e-commerce and last-mile delivery. Kermalli attended alongside Transworld chairman Ramesh S. Ramakrishnan. The proposal concerned end-to-end services for the Gulf Cooperation Council region. It placed his partnership work in another geography, with another set of networks to connect.

The memorandum records an intention to build together. It also fits the recurring commercial question in his career: which capabilities can partners assemble that a merchant would struggle to put together alone? A carrier relationship, a fulfillment operation and a regional delivery arrangement answer different parts of that question.

“We want small business owners to be able to focus on innovating in their area of expertise”

Rizwan Kermalli, 2022

His stated ambition gives the expansion a human measure. A merchant has a product to improve, a customer to understand and a business to run. Shipping competes for the same hours. The usefulness of a logistics company lies partly in how much competent work it can take off that person’s desk.

The courier who once carried the parcel now works on the arrangements around it. The distances are longer and the organization more involved, but the delivery still ends somewhere specific. There is a customer waiting at the other end, and a smaller business hoping the next order will be worth sending.