Cleveland — What started as a bedroom-based resale gig has turned into a fast-growing packaging business for Charlie Schilla. Schilla is the president and CEO of Cleveland-based Supplyhut LLC, an online supplier of bubble rolls, bubble mailers and similar items.
The business got its start in 2009, when Schilla, who had just graduated from high school, bought $300 of merchandise from an Ink Stop location that was closing. Schilla sold those items online and then bought more merchandise from Ink Stop's Cleveland-area headquarters, as the entire business was folding. He also bought office supply items from Blonder's, a local paint company that was closing.
All the while, Schilla was attending a local college and working a part-time job as a dishwasher.
"I really just wanted to be a stockbroker, but these opportunities came along," he said recently at the firm's headquarters.
The resale business, which had expanded into electronics, soon took over the basement of the family home in Independence, Ohio. By 2014, Schilla's parents were planning to move, so he needed another location. That's also when he thought there might be a business opportunity in packaging.
"I was using so much packaging for shipping on eBay," Schilla said. "So I approached a few packaging companies here in the U.S. and offered to be their online distributor, but I was turned down every time."
He kept looking and eventually found an offshore supplier that agreed to sell him three containers of bubble wrap and bubble mailers for $80,000. He rented 3,800 square feet of warehouse space in nearby Broadview Heights and stopped selling his other items to focus on packaging.
In 2016, he approached U.S. packaging companies again, and Polyair Inter Pack Inc. agreed to use Supplyhut as a distributor. By this time, the firm had doubled the size of its warehouse space.