Two operators, one frustration, one 3PL.
Before Matrix, our two founders spent decades running and scaling e-commerce brands. Forty years of combined experience navigating Shopify launches, Amazon listing battles, Q4 peak season chaos, and the slow grind of building a brand from first order to first million.
That experience taught both partners the same lesson from opposite angles: the bottleneck in scaling an e-commerce brand is almost always fulfillment. Either your 3PL is slow on receiving, or erratic on accuracy, or nickel-and-dimes you on invoices you can't audit, or holds your inventory hostage when you try to leave.
They decided to build the 3PL they wished they'd had. [CONFIRM founding origin — partner names, what brands they ran before Matrix, the specific 3PL frustration that triggered the founding.]
In 2017, the two partners opened Matrix Fulfillment in Los Angeles with one operating principle: run the warehouse the way an operator wishes their 3PL would run it. Modern WMS, no contracts, no minimums, transparent pricing, named human accountability. Nine years later, that's still the operating principle.
Los Angeles, minutes from the Port of Long Beach.
Our facility sits in the Los Angeles area, a short drive from the Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles. Combined, those two ports handle roughly 40 percent of all containerized cargo entering the United States. For a brand sourcing from Asia — which is most DTC brands in 2026 — that proximity isn't a nice-to-have. It's days of transit time, weeks of inventory turn, and thousands of dollars in drayage costs.
Inbound freight that lands at the Port of Long Beach can be at our dock within hours of clearing customs. East Coast 3PLs need 5 to 7 days of cross-country drayage before they can even start receiving. By the time an East Coast 3PL is putting away your stock, we've been shipping it for a week.
The same proximity advantage applies on the outbound side. Two-day ground shipping covers the entire West Coast from our dock. The major California metros — Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego — are next-day ground. For brands whose customers cluster on the West Coast, that's a structural advantage no East Coast 3PL can match.
Modern WMS, named accountability, no shortcuts.
We run our warehouse on ShipHero WMS — the same system that powers some of the largest DTC brands in the country. That's a deliberate choice. Most 3PLs of our size run homegrown software built by their first ops hire a decade ago and held together with duct tape. ShipHero gives us real-time inventory, batch picking, mobile scan-pack, and native integrations to every platform our clients sell on. It's not the cheapest option. It's the right one.
Every client gets a named account lead with a direct phone and email. Not a generic support inbox, not a ticket queue, not a Slack channel that nobody monitors. One person who knows your account, your products, and your channel mix — and who can walk over to the warehouse floor and look at your shipment if something's off.
Every invoice is itemized by line. Every charge ties back to a specific service we performed. You'll never see "Miscellaneous Fulfillment Services" on an invoice from us.
A 3PL should be invisible to your customer and accountable to you.
The 3PL industry has historically operated on two assumptions: that customers will tolerate vendor lock-in if it's wrapped in friendly account managers, and that founders will eventually learn to stop asking questions about line items they don't understand.
We disagree. We think a 3PL should be the part of your operation that doesn't cause you stress. Inventory shows up. Orders ship. Customers get tracking. Returns get processed. Invoices make sense. When something breaks, somebody calls you before you have to call them.
That sounds simple. The reason most brands eventually switch 3PLs is because almost nobody actually does it.