How to Go Public While Taking Care of Your People

"Chieh Huang started an e-commerce company in his garage and took it public in eight years. At every step, he prioritized his workers. His dream is to show future generations a “different way to do business.”

- By Elizabeth Greenwood

Chieh Huang walks the 150,000-square-foot floor of a Boxed fulfillment center. Nestled between the New Jersey Turnpike and a quaint residential neighborhood—just 20-odd miles from his childhood home—this place could comfortably fit more than 400 of the garages where he started this business in 2013. Pallets of V8, Polar seltzer, and Cheerios are stacked three stories high. A series of seemingly endless conveyor belts ferry tubs filled with thousands of products, like a roller-coaster ride of household essentials.

But Huang nods toward the front door. To him, that’s where the business really starts. “All employees and management walk through that door,” he says. “There’s no executive washroom, and we all use the same break room.”

In a perfect world, there would be nothing interesting about that fact. A door is a door; a human is a human. But in our actual world full of executive privilege and dollars measured in microseconds, this isn’t always the case. Especially in Huang’s industry.

In theory, e-commerce is a beautiful thing. It’s the height of convenience for consumers and a liberating marketplace for entrepreneurs. But e-commerce is also a great collector of data, and data can be cold and ruthless. Data can show that if, say, warehouse workers move three steps faster, they will shave seconds off every fulfillment, and when replicated at scale, that will result in millions of dollars saved. Efficiency is hard to argue with, and it often wins at human cost.