Scale-up Spotlight: A conversation with Co-founder and CEO of Sendcloud, Rob van den Heuvel

We spoke with the CEO and Co-founder of Sendcloud, Rob van den Heuvel, about the growth of his company and how it has adapted to the post-Covid-19 world.

Sendcloud is an all-in-one shipping platform for e-commerce businesses that want to become international giants. Rob van den Heuvel came up with the idea for Sendcloud back in 2012 when he and his partners Bas Smeulders (Co-founder and COO) and Sabi Tolou (Co-founder and CCO) all ran an online store in phone accessories. “Things were going great, and our businesses were growing,” he explained, “but we were struggling with shipping as it was both time-consuming and expensive. After some beers, we decided to come up with a solution ourselves and asked a friend to help us build the software. Sendcloud was born, and the rest is history!”

Sendcloud started in the Netherlands but has quickly become one of the fastest growing scale-ups in Europe, with more than 23,000 customers across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Austria. Its current customers range from small to enterprise-sized online retailers in industries ranging from fashion and electronics to food and drink.

Sendcloud differentiates itself in the market by being customer- and solution-centric, saying: “technology is at the heart of everything we do here”. Its end-to-end product covers the entire process, putting everything they need in one platform. In comparison, most retailers typically use three or four separate tools for shipping, labels, order picking, and returns.

Through its carrier and partner network, Sendcloud positions itself as one of the European leaders in enabling retailers to grow internationally. It’s also fully scalable, catering to businesses of all sizes, whether they ship 40 parcels a month or 400,000.

Covid-19 has massively affected businesses in the last two years, and e-commerce gained rapid momentum because of the lockdown measures as high street stores closed and people flocked to online shopping in huge numbers. When asked about Sendcloud’s last milestone as a company, van den Heuvel said: “it has to be rapidly expanding our team to keep up with this growth. We started with 140 employees in 2020 and recently reached the milestone of 430 employees” reiterating our status as one of the fastest growing companies in Europe.

Where other companies have had to slow their work down to adapt to the new changes, Sendcloud has found itself in a state of flux. This meant hiring people even faster than planned and managing all of this remotely. The biggest challenge for Sendcloud according to van der Heuvel has been scaling up the business even faster than originally expected whilst making sure new members are onboarded properly and staff remain motivated whilst working remotely.

E-commerce has grown tremendously during this past year, but now that shops have reopened and consumers have returned to the high street, this growth will naturally slow down. However, it can still be expected that many consumers will opt for online shopping in the long term. Lockdown has really caused an acceleration of an ongoing trend that ensures their safety and gives them peace of mind in a dangerous world.

In the post-Covid world, many consumers may be craving the physical shopping experience and excitement that you simply can’t provide online. However, consumers have realized the full range of benefits of online shopping, from the peace of mind to deliveries built around their schedule, and have made it part of their routine. Covid-19 has set an irreversible trend when it comes to online shopping, and an omnichannel approach to shopping is here to stay as consumers get used to this new shopping environment.

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