company culture,” Vagenas stresses. “And we’re working on creating an environment that is increasingly one big team of interconnecting departments.”
While many Ecommerce competitors see the decades-long decline of the Big box store as an eventual void to fill, Vagenas and his team are trying to prop-up some of these slumping giants now rather than getting in line to stand on their shoulders later. “Big box stores seem to be moving in the markets recently; they are declining year-after-year in every category,” Vagenas explains. “Now, a lot of these Big box stores are focusing their attention online – Ecommerce. Whether it’s an independent Ecommerce platform, or whether it’s their own website, they’re really trying to latch-on to change. You see it happening with Sears, K-Mart (which is a Seas company), and Walmart, which has been increasingly engaged in this process for years and has a done a good job of that. Target is starting the process. Everyone’s shifting to online now. And some of them are far behind because Amazon has already taken up so much market space.” Enter Pharmapacks. “We’ve never bought a box solution. We build everything in-house. Whether it’s customer service platforms, accounting platforms, logistic platforms, our own internal sales channel, we build it at our own house and I think that’s what makes us unique.” “That’s our future. Keep adding sales channels and distribution channels and just continue on what we’re doing, expanding into new categories and keeping up with the product line,” Vagenas calcu- lates. He humbly credits a healthy market place for Pharmapacks’ ability to wage the kind of pricing wars that help build their brand on Amazon. “We have a following of customers through Amazon that when they shop through Amazon and they’re looking for health and beauty products, they’re looking at Pharmapacks first.” What’s even more encouraging – and speaks to the probability of Vagenas’ latter revenue projection for 2017 – is Pharmapacks’ impressive Amazon customer rating that ranges from 98 to 99 percent. Happy customers, like employees, are active ones. “We get a lot of free publicity coming our way like this,” Vagenas boasts.
What puts Pharmapacks among the fastest growing retailers in North America is a two-part business identity. The first component of this identity is Pharma- packs’ unwavering diplomacy in the spirit of commerce. “Their growth equals our growth,” Vagenas says. “Many companies out there will try to compete against Amazon and compete against these other web retailers and our goal was to work with them.” This connectivity in the business community is a macrocosm of what Vagenas and his team strive for in their workplace. “Our goal is employee culture,
The second – and ineffaceable – part of Pharmapacks’ business identity is their in-house ingenu- ity. “Our company has grown because of the technology we built,” Vagenas asserts. “We built
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS • MAY 2016
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