As a structural engineering student travelling regularly between the University of Edinburgh and his home in Northern Ireland, Paul Stewart quickly discovered the faff involved in getting his personal belongings home each time he changed student accommodation.
Having found no easy way to do so, Stewart spotted a gap in the market for a door-to-door courier service for luggage and personal effects and Belfast-based My Baggage was born.
Stewart launched his business back in 2010 but since then the company has expanded well beyond moving students’ personal effects to become a fully fledged luggage shipping company that moves the belongings of those moving around the world to work or study.
My Baggage also looks after customs clearance and it was this aspect of the business that sparked the idea for the company’s new service, a fully digitised customs-clearance system for personal effects, which was launched in April.
“As far as we know we are the first provider of a fully digital process to clear customs for personal effects shipments. At the moment it’s very manual with paperwork needing to be completed by hand and attached to a shipment,” says Stewart.
“It can be very difficult for people to know what forms to fill in to allow their personal effects to enter a new country without accruing customs duties. Each country has its own set of forms that need to be completed in advance, along with a pro forma invoice and several paper copies created for each of the relevant authorities.”
“By harnessing the power of technology, we have been able to digitise the process, removing the hassle for customers and making it much easier for them to move the items they would find difficult to take on a flight. Right now, many of them resort to paying huge excess baggage fees to airlines to bring what they want on board,” he said.
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“When using our product, customers only need to answer one set of questions online, upload their passports and list the items they are sending,” says Stewart.
“My Baggage then generates all the paperwork needed and submits it electronically to the customs authority on their behalf. Our system uses AI to spot any mistakes in the details a customer has entered, for example trying to send items that are prohibited in a particular country, thereby speeding up the process with little manual intervention required.”
My Baggage ships to and from 160 countries from five main markets: the UK, Ireland, the US, Australia and most recently France. It employs 22 people including three in the Philippines and between the two offices they provide a 24-hour customer service.
Stewart says investment in the business since its foundation has been about €1 million with the new digital custom’s system costing about €300,000 to develop with support coming from Invest NI for research and development.
The company operates a B2C model and its main clients are individuals moving country. However, in many cases their employer provides a moving allowance for relocation and Stewart is already looking at how the new digital customs clearance system could be adapted for B2B use as a stand-alone service.
My Baggage works with all the large courier companies worldwide and gets preferential rates. Its margin is the mark-up between what it buys the space for and what it charges its customers. However, Stewart says its rates are still 50-60 per cent lower than an individual would pay if they went directly to the courier company.
Asked about the type of items people want to ship abroad Stewart said it was all the usual things such as clothes, books, knick-knacks and bulky items. One of the more unusual pieces the company handled was a very expensive anatomical skeleton for a medical student and apparently expats regularly use the company to ship the non-perishable foods, including spuds, they miss from home.
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