THUNDER BAY – Wedding dresses, puppies, wheelchairs – those are just some of the items destined for Thunder Bay residents that ended up stranded on the other side of the U.S. border when it closed due to COVID-19 in March.
After quietly reuniting owners with some of those items in recent months, a Thunder Bay business is officially launching its cross-border delivery service.
James Foulds, founder of Border Giant, says his business will offer individuals the lowest prices he’s aware of anywhere in Canada for customs clearance and cross-border shipping, starting at $15.
He began planning the business a couple of years ago, looking to lower costs for local producers and artisans to ship goods to customers in the U.S.. He originally planned to launch the service in 2021.
But when the border closed, the company’s ability to ship across the border soon drew a growing number of requests to bring items to Thunder Bay from the Ryden’s Border Store just across the Pigeon River crossing.
That led Foulds to accelerate his schedule, officially launching online ordering Monday – though he warns the volume of requests means there’s likely to be a waiting list as he scales up.
“Word got out that we can do this, so we sped things up,” he explains. “I thought, people need it right now. I was nervous, because you don’t want to seem opportunistic, either.”
His experience tells a tale of how many local residents rely on cross-border shipping, for items ranging from essential to esoteric.
“We started hearing things about people who had wheelchairs stranded, or their wedding dress, puppies, things like that,” he says.
“Lots of specialty foods – I didn’t realize how important that was to people with certain dietary needs, or some people have autistic children who can only eat certain things, and they couldn’t find them in Canada.”
Jason Horychuk is one early customer. A set of goalie pads for his son, Alek, had arrived at Ryden’s the night the border closed. After months of waiting, they were delivered by Border Giant, just in time for his first practice.
The company had to jump through more than a few hoops to be legally allowed to bring items across the border, putting up bonds to be registered with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and writing a test to become a licensed customs broker.
“We tick all the boxes to be legal,” he says. “I think we’ve counted over 32 registrations we’ve had to do.”
That will allow the company to move into a market Foulds sees as dramatically under-developed and overpriced.
“We’re trying to fill in that massive part of e-commerce goods that couriers just won’t go get, because it’s not worth it,” he explains.
The key to lowering costs, Foulds believes, lies in data management. The information chain on a package usually stops at Ryden’s, he says, where a courier would have to start from scratch on submitting information at the border – a process that’s significantly more laborious for commercial carriers than for individuals.
“That couple of minutes where you have to transmit data to customs, have it analyzed – that’s where most the cost is, not the driving,” he says.
Foulds hopes to address that challenge with software the company is developing, originally intended for producers shipping across the border. Lower U.S. postal rates make it far cheaper to mail from Ryden’s.
“For local companies, [it can] cost $15 dollars to ship a bottle of sauce or something to the States,” Foulds says. “If you drive over the border, you can do it for around $3.”
His business idea is earning attention from more than just interested customers: Border Giant recently received nearly $140,000 in start-up support from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC).
It’s an exciting, if overwhelming time for Foulds, who has now hired several drivers and coders in an effort to keep up.
