SUPPLIER INTERVIEW UNLOCK POTENTIAL MIHA JAGODIC, FOUNDER AND CEO OF BLOQ.IT, EXPLAINS HOW THE COMPANY IS REVOLUTIONIZING THE PARCEL LOCKER INDUSTRY WITH AGNOSTIC SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE SOLUTIONS Tell us about Bloq.it and how you got started. we found ourselves in a hyper-growth industry with one of the most advanced products on the market. ABOVE: Bloq.it was launched in 2019 to address the need for multifunctional locker networks Bloq.it was started in 2019; the first idea was to build our own multifunctional locker network for storing items and sending and receiving parcels. Our first issue was that we couldn’t find a suitable provider for the software and the hardware, so we made the decision to build it on our own, from scratch. While doing so, we started receiving a lot of business inquiries, so even before we could start rolling out our own locker network – we’d only deployed four lockers at the time – we were already moving and shifting to a B2B model as a technology provider. When Covid started and e-commerce grew exponentially, What makes you stand out from the competition? Software has been the core differentiator of our product since the beginning, and our Bloq.it OS, which consists of different software products, is the most advanced software stack on the market. We have been fortunate enough to validate that with our recent landmark partnership with DHL eCommerce. DHL had a very tough challenge to solve at the time: it was growing its locker footprint very aggressively – including buying existing locker networks – and consequently got into a situation where it had a lot of different machines from different providers that were not properly integrated into a central system. To fix this, DHL launched a tender to find a software platform that could unify all the lockers under one software layer. This is the type of challenge we were born to solve, and it is what we’re doing now with DHL eCommerce – we’re going country to country applying our software on existing locker networks and unifying them while creating a better flow that still caters to the individual needs of each country. We started in the Czech Republic late last year, and this year we are planning to do up to four countries, but I can’t disclose those yet. SOFTWARE HAS BEEN THE CORE DIFFERENTIATOR OF OUR PRODUCT SINCE THE BEGINNING, AND OUR BLOQ.IT OS IS THE MOST ADVANCED SOFTWARE STACK ON THE MARKET” Miha Jagodic, Bloq.it What other business wins are you particularly proud of? I mentioned DHL, which we are very proud of because it is a unique project and the first of its type in the market, but the other project we are very proud of is Vinted. It was our first enterprise project, and its trust in us was key for our path so we will always have a soft spot for it! 60 www.ParcelandPostalTechnologyInternational.com March 2024