HONG KONG – Growing up as weekend sporting rivals on the cricket and rugby fields of Wellington, Chris Crutchley and Nick Bartlett never anticipated becoming international business partners. After relocating to Hong Kong to pursue successful corporate careers in banking and oil, the standard corporate grind eventually lost its lustre. Seeking to build something of their own, the duo decided over a few drinks on a holiday in Vietnam to pool their resources and launch a venture. They initially acquired a licensed Hong Kong courier business, scaling it rapidly to 300 clients and securing a fourfold return, which they promptly sold to fund their next major disruption: Wayfindr.
Operating from their base in Hong Kong, Wayfindr was born out of a major friction point the founders identified in global commerce, namely the extreme rigidity of traditional third-party logistics (3PL) providers. Asset-heavy firms routinely rejected fast-growing brands with complex or contrasting fulfilment needs with a standard “sorry, can’t do it.”
Crutchley and Bartlett envisioned a highly adaptive alternative, pioneering an asset-light fourth-party logistics (4PL) model. By acting as digital supply chain orchestrators rather than asset owners, Wayfindr successfully coordinates complex vendor networks without owning a single delivery van or leasing warehouse space.
The business has since evolved into a sophisticated, tech-driven enterprise powered by their proprietary dashboard software, Bundle, which directly links over 300 global suppliers to give clients end-to-end transparency. They have recently advanced their platform capabilities by embedding artificial intelligence through Compass, an automated onboarding and oversight module providing a bird’s-eye view of real-time product movements.
Remarkably, this rapid international expansion to an eight-figure revenue business with over 50 staff has been entirely bootstrapped out of their own operational revenues, completely avoiding equity dilution. Today, Wayfindr processes over one million international orders annually across 15 major city markets, remaining deeply committed to leveraging their global network to help ambitious Australian and New Zealand brands seamlessly crack open international markets.
Learn more about Wayfindr at www.wayfindr.io
