About Us
In 2004, when I was 17 years old, I developed my first online transportation system. The company INTEL invited me to the science fair INTEL ISEF in the USA, which was the impulse for me to start my business in transportation. Then there was the financial crisis of 2008 and I could barely cover my living expenses. Our customers were looking for a cheap way to get small packages delivered from Germany. At that time, I was also putting my mountain bike together and I bought the components on eBay.de. The transportation to the Czech Republic was expensive and slow. One day I went to Germany to try to change that. Today through our warehouses we handle up to 200 000 shipments annually for 140 000 customers.
Ondřej Krabs, Executive director
History
2008 - 2015
We arranged pallet shipments and whole truck load shipments throughout Europe, and even an old car in a shipping container from the USA. Sometimes the drivers would call us with problems such as: „I am north of the Artic Circle and the shipment is too wide for the trailer." Or the client calls: „I’m stuck out at sea. I will load the shipment the day after tomorrow, wait in the port. Help will come in 24 hours." Another weekend we had to deal with a fine for a driver in Austria, who had been overloaded by the freight forwarder in Italy and the whole truck was confiscated by the police. Transportation is very good for stress management. With the computer programmer Petr Sidor we continued to work on innovations for our system and our main focus was the freight between the Czech Republic, Germany and EU. We also started to pack shipments on loaders and the work with physical shipments also increased.
2010
I was invited to lunch by the founder of the biggest online travel agency in the Czech Republic, INVIA, who gave me helpful tips and showed me another viewpoint on the e-commerce world. Even the owner of Shipito contacted me with whom I discussed the posibility of a cooperation in the USA. In the end, this idea was cancelled. At that time I told myself that the one thing which is helping me to move forward is the fact that I don ́t have to rely on anybody and I can fully concentrate on shipping in Europe.
2011
We tried to do the transport by ourselves between Germany and the Czech Republic with our own vehicle every evening, delivering the next day. At night, we handed over the shipments to the carrier from CS Expres. This carrier however went bankrupt and after some time we set up cooperation with the companies Geis Parcel and Czech Post.
2012
In January 2012, I founded the company Mailboxde.com in Germany for processing shipments and I hired my first employees. I soon found out that our first warehouse would no longer suffice.
Jakub was our first full time employee and it was he who also for many years boycotted any kind of innovation because he was always ahead of it. He is working for us till this day.
2013I got just a few hours of sleep a day and I saw that many things would have to change for the sake of the years which we still have ahead of us. There was this one time when I came home at 7 am. Many people would have certainly said that my way of doing things was wrong and that I didn ́t know how to delegate. We would find out but it was going to take many years. We were in an unhealthy growth phase, it was just crazy. We were looking for shortcuts and at the same time we were doing everything.
We were checked by almost every possible authority, some of which I hadn ́t even heard of. The checks took many hours but I began to get used to the way it works in Germany and that there’s no getting round it. Even the police and the customs authorities helped us to find a solution so that everything would be alright.
I looked for another warehouse but I didn ́t know if we could manage everything. In the end, I found one. It was a former weaving mill and before we arrived cars with vertically opening doors were produced there.
We were checked by almost every possible authority, some of which I hadn ́t even heard of. The checks took many hours but I began to get used to the way it works in Germany and that there’s no getting round it. Even the police and the customs authorities helped us to find a solution so that everything would be alright.
I looked for another warehouse but I didn ́t know if we could manage everything. In the end, I found one. It was a former weaving mill and before we arrived cars with vertically opening doors were produced there.
2014
We didn ́t have any workers for the new warehouse and I was afraid of hiring them. I didn ́t know how things would turn out and that ́s why I was waiting for the break-even point, at this point I could be sure that we would be able to pay for the warehouse and the employees and the other expenses.
Up until that point I had done everything on my own. It was stressful and at the same time cold. Occasionally, some of the lads from the second warehouse came over to help me. At the end of the year we took on more colleagues. It proved a little more difficult to get the right people.
Up until that point I had done everything on my own. It was stressful and at the same time cold. Occasionally, some of the lads from the second warehouse came over to help me. At the end of the year we took on more colleagues. It proved a little more difficult to get the right people.
2015
On 1st January 2015, we changed our German legal company form to Mailboxde.com GmbH. The judge wanted to see my CV, too. The whole case lasted 8 months and it also was the most costly operation in the history of our company. Today, I would have done things differently.
2017
Sometimes it looks like an airport at our place. The conditions and controls for the international freight have become very strict since 2017. So for us, it means that the cooperation with Customs is on a daily basis. The German Customs Service organized the first international trip with the Czech Customs service to our warehouses. It was a very rare sight when five vehicles with blue lights from the Czech Customs service were accompanied by their German colleagues and all of them parked in front of our warehouse in Germany.
2018
This year Mailboxde.com GmbH received a postal license from the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur).
2020 - Corona Crisis - First Wave
2020 - Corona Crisis - First Wave
At the end of February, we bought a large supply of food and hygiene supplies for emergencies if the border closes (our company in Germany on the border with the Czech Republic at that time had 11 Czech colleagues living in the Czech Republic, the so-called “commuters", crossing the border every day). We made up emergency survival boxes for 14 days according to Bundeswehr instructions. Customers from Asia informed us of the seriousness of the situation. We could see things starting in Italy, where the shelves in the grocery stores are already empty. Commuters were not allowed to travel more than 50 km from the border without going into quarantine. There is no disinfectant either in Germany or in the Czech Republic. There are no sterile gloves of any kind. Everything was sold out. As a carrier, I ended up picking these up for the Czech Post, Geis Parcel, GLS Czech Republic and MESSENGER with the permission of the Czech customs and the export permit of BAFA at Berlin airport. Exhausted, I fell asleep in the car in the parking lot. One of our suppliers produced WHO-prescribed disinfectant in his factory. A barter deal was struck. We supplied the hydrogen peroxide, he made the disinfectant. On Sunday, March 14, 2020, at 12:00, the borders between the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany were going to be closed. In the middle of my birthday party, I threw my stuff for about a month out of the closet into my bag and went looking for border crossings where we could still enter Germany. We didn´t know what would happen, my colleague Jan was an hour behind me. We bought fuel in petrol canisters. On 16.3.2020 the border really closed and the commuters had to stay indefinitely in Germany 30 km away from their families, because they would have been obliged to quarantine for 14 days on their return.
According to a statement made by Czech government officials on Novinky.cz on 19 March 2020, “even some commuters are not complying with the measure. They should only go to work. They should not leave the house except to go to work. The ability of our citizens to travel abroad is a big loophole in the quarantine measures. But if this new measure does not work, the government will ban commuters from travelling abroad.”
On April 11, 2020, the incidence rate was 0.11% of the population in Prague (in the Czech Republic) and 0.02% in Saxony (one of Germany´s largest federal states), a state of 4 million people. In a personal letter with a proposed solution to the Czech Minister of the Interior, I stated that 140,000 workers from other regions commute to Prague every day and tried to draw attention to unequal rights. According to Eurostat, there were 37 000 Czech people commuting to the whole of Germany. At this time, however, we were always talking only in absolute numbers. It was only later that the number of infected people per 100 000 inhabitants began to be presented.
Hotels were closed. The first cross-border carriers were cancelling their services because the detour between our warehouse and the carriers’ logistics depots was 211 km there and 211 km back (instead of the usual 2 x 28 km) and they were running out of energy to argue at the border crossing for vehicles up to 3.5 t, although their vehicles fell within this tonnage. Half of my colleagues packed their things and slept in their offices in Zittau for 3 weeks. Neighbours brought a ping-pong table to their warehouse and a barbecue outside the warehouse. I myself was replacing three transport companies from the Czech Republic with the biggest van we had bought in a hurry. In the Lusatian Mountains there is a border crossing on a narrow road where the detour is only 50 km. The route is complicated, we negotiated with the police, customs and the governor of the Liberec region for an exemption, which we finally got. Because I was travelling between the Czech Republic and Germany as a carrier, I could not go to my company in Germany and I had to always be outside like other drivers to avoid being ordered into quarantine in the Czech Republic.
The tense situation at that time and the negotiations of the commuters with the members of the government were presented on Czech Radio in an article from 2.4.2020 entitled “Commuters are unlucky. In an open letter they asked for concessions, the government will not allow them to travel for work.”
My colleagues gave me a daily grocery shopping list. One of them snores so much at night that they started sleeping in shifts. The Czech police warned me at the border that I was not even allowed to go grocery shopping in Germany. I would have to go into quarantine on my return home.
In the police database I have over 80 border checks from that time, during which I had long conversations with Czech police officers before I was allowed to cross the border. Each crossing was uncertain, the negotiations nerve-wracking, but I became friends with the officers after a while - I carried printed out the current regulations and sometimes had to use a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior as a mediator, from whom I had a phone number. 11 senators from the Mayor´s Club after a certain period drew attention to the conflict with the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, which states that “whoever is lawfully residing on the territory of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic has the right to leave it freely”.
Some days I had to stop outside the borders to absorb the stress. One day, a vehicle behind my car stopped at a rest area, the driver of which was watching the progress of my border check. He asked me, "Can I help you?" He asked me for copies of communications with the authorities and the facts. He said nothing. He was a professional. From the next day on, border crossings were smooth and conversations were much more relaxed.
I wrote a letter to the Saxon Minister President Michael Kretschmer with a proposed solution. At the same time, I informed him that some single parent colleagues who had alternate childcare could not come to work across the border indefinitely and we were looking for a solution. He probably got more letters like this, so the German Embassy in Prague issued us a note confirming our inclusion in the German crisis infrastructure before the Czech authorities. Colleagues could therefore start going home with restrictions, but after 3 weeks. The situation at the border in the mountains was not quite certain, so the colleagues waited on the German side and called the Czech police to see if they could cross the border and if the police would order quarantine. Everything was confirmed and they went home for Easter.
In December 2020 I got sick with the corona virus. I was really sick for 14 days. Our warehouses were literally bursting at the seams and we had no room for handling. Colleagues in Germany were so exhausted from the onslaught of shipments that we stopped registering new customers for a month in order to take care of the existing ones. When registration restarted, 700 new clients registered in one day.
2021 - Corona Crisis - Second Wave
According to a statement made by Czech government officials on Novinky.cz on 19 March 2020, “even some commuters are not complying with the measure. They should only go to work. They should not leave the house except to go to work. The ability of our citizens to travel abroad is a big loophole in the quarantine measures. But if this new measure does not work, the government will ban commuters from travelling abroad.”
On April 11, 2020, the incidence rate was 0.11% of the population in Prague (in the Czech Republic) and 0.02% in Saxony (one of Germany´s largest federal states), a state of 4 million people. In a personal letter with a proposed solution to the Czech Minister of the Interior, I stated that 140,000 workers from other regions commute to Prague every day and tried to draw attention to unequal rights. According to Eurostat, there were 37 000 Czech people commuting to the whole of Germany. At this time, however, we were always talking only in absolute numbers. It was only later that the number of infected people per 100 000 inhabitants began to be presented.
Hotels were closed. The first cross-border carriers were cancelling their services because the detour between our warehouse and the carriers’ logistics depots was 211 km there and 211 km back (instead of the usual 2 x 28 km) and they were running out of energy to argue at the border crossing for vehicles up to 3.5 t, although their vehicles fell within this tonnage. Half of my colleagues packed their things and slept in their offices in Zittau for 3 weeks. Neighbours brought a ping-pong table to their warehouse and a barbecue outside the warehouse. I myself was replacing three transport companies from the Czech Republic with the biggest van we had bought in a hurry. In the Lusatian Mountains there is a border crossing on a narrow road where the detour is only 50 km. The route is complicated, we negotiated with the police, customs and the governor of the Liberec region for an exemption, which we finally got. Because I was travelling between the Czech Republic and Germany as a carrier, I could not go to my company in Germany and I had to always be outside like other drivers to avoid being ordered into quarantine in the Czech Republic.
The tense situation at that time and the negotiations of the commuters with the members of the government were presented on Czech Radio in an article from 2.4.2020 entitled “Commuters are unlucky. In an open letter they asked for concessions, the government will not allow them to travel for work.”
My colleagues gave me a daily grocery shopping list. One of them snores so much at night that they started sleeping in shifts. The Czech police warned me at the border that I was not even allowed to go grocery shopping in Germany. I would have to go into quarantine on my return home.
In the police database I have over 80 border checks from that time, during which I had long conversations with Czech police officers before I was allowed to cross the border. Each crossing was uncertain, the negotiations nerve-wracking, but I became friends with the officers after a while - I carried printed out the current regulations and sometimes had to use a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior as a mediator, from whom I had a phone number. 11 senators from the Mayor´s Club after a certain period drew attention to the conflict with the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, which states that “whoever is lawfully residing on the territory of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic has the right to leave it freely”.
Some days I had to stop outside the borders to absorb the stress. One day, a vehicle behind my car stopped at a rest area, the driver of which was watching the progress of my border check. He asked me, "Can I help you?" He asked me for copies of communications with the authorities and the facts. He said nothing. He was a professional. From the next day on, border crossings were smooth and conversations were much more relaxed.
I wrote a letter to the Saxon Minister President Michael Kretschmer with a proposed solution. At the same time, I informed him that some single parent colleagues who had alternate childcare could not come to work across the border indefinitely and we were looking for a solution. He probably got more letters like this, so the German Embassy in Prague issued us a note confirming our inclusion in the German crisis infrastructure before the Czech authorities. Colleagues could therefore start going home with restrictions, but after 3 weeks. The situation at the border in the mountains was not quite certain, so the colleagues waited on the German side and called the Czech police to see if they could cross the border and if the police would order quarantine. Everything was confirmed and they went home for Easter.
In December 2020 I got sick with the corona virus. I was really sick for 14 days. Our warehouses were literally bursting at the seams and we had no room for handling. Colleagues in Germany were so exhausted from the onslaught of shipments that we stopped registering new customers for a month in order to take care of the existing ones. When registration restarted, 700 new clients registered in one day.
2021 - Corona Crisis - Second Wave
The story of our colleague Kuba: „We spent our winter holidays in Kytlice. There was snow everywhere, it was freezing, it was like in a fairy tale. But it ended when we learned from Facebook that the German border was going to be closed. There followed a hectic packing and a quick move back home to Zittau, Germany, where we live. We made it across the border, but didn´t see the Czech Republic for another three months. We used to go cross-country skiing in Lückendorf, but it was a strange time. People were very scared, and we didn´t escape an incident when an elderly lady, a German woman, accused us on our cross-country skiing that we were not allowed to cross the border. In vain we tried to explain that although we were Czech, our home was Zittau. After Easter, there were big discounts on sweets because the shops were used to foreigners buying them, especially Czechs. This time, they had everything left. Except maybe toilet paper, which was constantly sold out. As we hadn´t seen our family for a long time, we decided that we didn´t want to experience this again and would find a place to live in the Czech Republic in the neighbouring Hrádek nad Nisou. We found a plot of land sold by the municipal authority using the sealed bid method. At the last minute, we ran to the border in Hartau with our bid, where we handed it over to our Czech friends under the supervision of soldiers, who then handed it over to the authorities."
Packaging material and cardboard for its production were running out. The supplier had told us that we could only order truck-sized quantities. We did not have any additional space for storing it. I noticed that not far from us in the same street there was a 110 year old factory where springs for Wartburg cars, as well as for railway carriages, were produced until 1993. A seller from West Germany used to make car mats there. The production ceased due to the introduction of the minimum wage, which made it no longer affordable for competitive operations. Other companies from Prague were interested in the building but couldn´t come to Germany. There was an emergency. Moreover, Germany would not allow them to enter its territory without a quarantine order. I walked through the factory, which looked like a bad movie from the GDR era, and told the surprised real estate agent that we were in. We wanted to completely renovate this factory. For the time being, we had a place to store packaging materials.
Narration by Jan: „While we were slowly recovering from the previous wave of the epidemic, history repeated itself. When the border between the Czech Republic and Germany was closed for the second time in a year in February 2021, I felt hopeless. Facing the unknown, I hastily packed my belongings into my backpack, said goodbye to friends and family, and crossed the border as I do every day, except that I didn´t know when I would return to my native country again. Together with my colleagues, we checked in at the nearby Hotel Weberhof, where the owner, a friendly Italian woman named Gracia, welcomed us with open arms. In my spare time I went for a run, discovered the beauty of the local Lusatian mountains, read and did everything I could to forget what was happening. Meanwhile, my friends in Liberec went cross-country skiing and I was looking forward to seeing them again and hitting the trail together. My colleagues and I were monitoring the situation, which was changing from day to day. At the end of February, the good news came and we returned to our homes again. However, movement between countries was subject to the presentation of a negative corona antigen test, which couldn´t be older than 48 hours. We quickly set up our own testing centre directly in Germany, where we were tested by our colleague Ondřej, who had received authorisation from the German Red Cross. If we had tested in the Czech Republic, we would not have been reimbursed by the insurance company in case of a positive result. We all wore protective equipment in the workplace to eliminate the risk of possible infection and some colleagues were already at the end of their strength. At the same time, we were checked every day at the border by the Federal Police to make sure we had all our documents such as our employment contract, completed arrival form and other documents together with the negative PCR test result. At the beginning of May, the mandatory testing of already vaccinated commuters was over. For the rest of the year the situation was already stabilizing and we slowly returned to normality. It was a period full of fear, anger towards people who took the situation lightly and chaos when no one knew what would happen next. Communication with the authorities became our daily bread. The pandemic had taken a lot out of us, but on the other hand it had taught us a lot."
Vojta adds, „It was not even possible to interview job applicants without a test and an employment contract. The tests were conducted by Ondrej at the interview after crossing the border, and I received a contract for an indefinite period of time in advance only on the basis of a phone conversation and probably my determination to stay in Germany indefinitely. Later, it was basically necessary for us to get vaccinated with a hastily developed vaccine. I remember being annoyed at this time by the daily verdicts of politicians and the brutal media messages, which did no good. I remember driving on half-empty roads and filling up with cheaper petrol, meeting people in the open countryside wearing masks, including cyclists, and how moving shipments from the warehouse across the border was problematic and had to be partly self-supported. I also recall the course of the disease and the loss of smell and taste for several weeks."
Packaging material and cardboard for its production were running out. The supplier had told us that we could only order truck-sized quantities. We did not have any additional space for storing it. I noticed that not far from us in the same street there was a 110 year old factory where springs for Wartburg cars, as well as for railway carriages, were produced until 1993. A seller from West Germany used to make car mats there. The production ceased due to the introduction of the minimum wage, which made it no longer affordable for competitive operations. Other companies from Prague were interested in the building but couldn´t come to Germany. There was an emergency. Moreover, Germany would not allow them to enter its territory without a quarantine order. I walked through the factory, which looked like a bad movie from the GDR era, and told the surprised real estate agent that we were in. We wanted to completely renovate this factory. For the time being, we had a place to store packaging materials.
Narration by Jan: „While we were slowly recovering from the previous wave of the epidemic, history repeated itself. When the border between the Czech Republic and Germany was closed for the second time in a year in February 2021, I felt hopeless. Facing the unknown, I hastily packed my belongings into my backpack, said goodbye to friends and family, and crossed the border as I do every day, except that I didn´t know when I would return to my native country again. Together with my colleagues, we checked in at the nearby Hotel Weberhof, where the owner, a friendly Italian woman named Gracia, welcomed us with open arms. In my spare time I went for a run, discovered the beauty of the local Lusatian mountains, read and did everything I could to forget what was happening. Meanwhile, my friends in Liberec went cross-country skiing and I was looking forward to seeing them again and hitting the trail together. My colleagues and I were monitoring the situation, which was changing from day to day. At the end of February, the good news came and we returned to our homes again. However, movement between countries was subject to the presentation of a negative corona antigen test, which couldn´t be older than 48 hours. We quickly set up our own testing centre directly in Germany, where we were tested by our colleague Ondřej, who had received authorisation from the German Red Cross. If we had tested in the Czech Republic, we would not have been reimbursed by the insurance company in case of a positive result. We all wore protective equipment in the workplace to eliminate the risk of possible infection and some colleagues were already at the end of their strength. At the same time, we were checked every day at the border by the Federal Police to make sure we had all our documents such as our employment contract, completed arrival form and other documents together with the negative PCR test result. At the beginning of May, the mandatory testing of already vaccinated commuters was over. For the rest of the year the situation was already stabilizing and we slowly returned to normality. It was a period full of fear, anger towards people who took the situation lightly and chaos when no one knew what would happen next. Communication with the authorities became our daily bread. The pandemic had taken a lot out of us, but on the other hand it had taught us a lot."
Vojta adds, „It was not even possible to interview job applicants without a test and an employment contract. The tests were conducted by Ondrej at the interview after crossing the border, and I received a contract for an indefinite period of time in advance only on the basis of a phone conversation and probably my determination to stay in Germany indefinitely. Later, it was basically necessary for us to get vaccinated with a hastily developed vaccine. I remember being annoyed at this time by the daily verdicts of politicians and the brutal media messages, which did no good. I remember driving on half-empty roads and filling up with cheaper petrol, meeting people in the open countryside wearing masks, including cyclists, and how moving shipments from the warehouse across the border was problematic and had to be partly self-supported. I also recall the course of the disease and the loss of smell and taste for several weeks."