The Corporate Marketplace
Staying relatively invisible has worked out nicely for Chris Crawford and his e-commerce company, The Corporate Marketplace (TCMPI). Since 2000, when Crawford started TCMPI, the company has been growing at an astronomical rate by connecting online buyers and sellers of jewelry and other products.
Located in North Kingstown, TCMPI produces software to online buyers and sellers, allowing them to complete transactions on the web without a third party. Before TCMPI’s software, some transactions (such as corporate rewards and incentives) could take months. This local company’s software has helped millions of buyers and sellers reduce the transaction time to mere minutes.
Before Crawford started TCMPI, he had worked for a number of jewelry manufacturers and was amazed at how often online sellers and buyers used a third party to secure products, and how slow this process was. After spending a number of years in this industry, Crawford decided to develop an easy purchasing hub for the buyers and sellers to use — eliminating the third party element.
But it was not an easy start.
In 2000, banks weren’t keen on doling out loans for software and computer companies. After being turned down by most banks, Crawford went to the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, which helped him procure a direct, fully-secured loan through the Small Business Loan Fund. After Crawford paid that loan off, banks and VCs were knocking on his door.
Crawford and his team at TCMPI spent long hours writing their own software, which seamlessly conducts transactions between buyers and sellers. The company also scored big when they landed an agreement with Amazon.com. When Amazon launched a jewelry section five years ago, they came to TCMPI for the company’s impressive software capabilities. TCMPI accesses the Amazon system every few minutes, takes down jewelry orders and distributes the orders to 42 different jewelry manufacturers.
Today, Crawford and his 20-plus employees oversee more than 1 million transactions a day and are enjoying exponential growth. TCMPI also broke Inc. magazine’s Inc.100 list of America’s fastest growing private companies, coming in at number 73 in 2007.