John Tuohy thinks outside the box

After selling his Nightline and Parcel Motel businesses, John Tuohy has returned to the logistics landscape with a new locker service, writes Basil Miller

John Tuohy sold courier company Night line and its parcel storage division, Parcel Motel, to UPS in 2017 for just under €30 million. Asked what it would feel like to have €10 million in his pocket at the age of 49, Tuohy gave a rueful laugh and said: “I wish!”.

“It was a highly leveraged business, so about €15 million of the proceeds went to write down the red ink,” he explains. “I had a 40% share of what was left and some extra payouts came out of that, not to mention the 30% tax bill. So no, I didn’t get to €10m for a pair of trousers – that would have been nice.”

After leaving Nightline, Tuohy took two years off, lost some weight, cycled a lot and started learning Spanish. Now he’s back in the parcel locker business OohPodwhich was registered in February 2021.

“Ooh” stands for Out Of Home and Tuohy is convinced that lockers, where people can drop off or pick up parcels or other items, have a bright future.

“I’m not in the parcel delivery business anymore,” he says. “OohPod provides an infrastructure that anyone can use, whether they are a courier company or an individual. We don’t have trucks or vans criss-crossing the country with packages and parcels. We just provide the place to leave it, the locker.

“It’s open to everyone. Any courier company can use the lockers, including my old company Parcel Motel or their competitors, whether Parcel Wizard, An Post or Fastway, although obviously the service will appeal more to couriers who don’t have lockers. That’s the big difference with Parcel Motel – our lockers are not tied to one company.”

A significant investment

Tuohy (54) has put his money. Oohpod Ltd’s distribution statement of September 2021 reveals an investment of €600,000 in the venture by the founder. The investment, made from nominee accounts, through a company controlled by Tuohy, raised an additional €820,000 in this funding round.

OohPod’s biggest supporter is the shipper JMC Vans Trans, which is for 1.5 million euros. Most recently, in August 2022, a Chinese logistics wizard Liam Casey invested €150,000 to acquire OohPod shares.

The OohPod team now includes a COO Orla Shalesformer head of Parcel Motel and chief technology officer Patrick Creanpreviously with Bank of Ireland and Channel 4.

For Oohpod to gain traction, it needs to build a large network of shipment lockers. To date there are 14, eight in the Republic and six in Northern Ireland. Tuohy talks about expanding the network to hundreds of sites, inspired by the experience in Estonia, where parcel lockers are part of the landscape.

In the Baltic country, which has half the population density of Ireland, around 90% of items bought online are delivered to a parcel locker. Tuohy says that when he sold Nightline, Parcel Motel’s market penetration was about 10% of parcel deliveries.

Another source of inspiration is InPost, the Polish parcel locker company that is listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange at a valuation of €9.5 billion and operates over 20,000 locations on the continent.

Cross-border shopping

One part of OohPod’s strategy is to take care of the online shopping complications arising from Brexit. NI locations are located close to the border, so consumers in border regions in the south can order from UK merchants and have their parcels collected in Banbridge, Belleek, Forhill, Jonesborough, Newtownbutler or Strabane.

“We have a depot in Ravensdale in Co Louth and a lot of people from Northern Ireland use it for their online EU purchases,” Tuohy explains.

“It works the other way around with our depots near the border on the north side where southerners can pick up parcels delivered by UK suppliers. It’s just like Parcel Motel, except you have to cross an imaginary line to pick up the goods yourself.

People who sign up for OohPod are given a personal identification number and can have their item delivered to any of the company’s locker locations. Tuohy has about 50,000 small online sellers in Ireland, and he envisions such vendors fulfilling orders by simply delivering shipping packages to his OohPod, each tagged with both their ID and that of the customer’s destination, for 3.50 euro per piece.

That’s why he thinks outside the box when it comes to where lockers are located. The Ranelagh locker site is across the road from the Luas stop entrance and there is also an OohPod site on the DCU campus.

The locker site adjacent to the company’s office on the Airways Industrial Estate in Swords is used by transport companies who use the lockers to leave truck keys and other essentials for drivers coming in for out-of-hours shifts.

Tuohy says it is exploring a deal with DPD and its Parcel Wizard division to integrate its pods into their service. Bus Eireann and Dublin Bus are also in its sights, although Irish Rail is reluctant to install lockers at its Dart and rail stations.

“In the UK there is a parcel locker like ours in every suburban railway station as well as major centres,” says Tuohy. “Only for sustainability reasons should rail companies do this. For example, take a worker whose delivery is scheduled for while he is at work. A van, almost certainly a diesel engine, arrives and finds that he is not there. Lost trip. Then our buyer finds the delivery attempt notice and either rearranges the delivery or drives to a depot to pick up.

“How much more reasonable and sustainable if the buyer can simply specify the specific locker at the local train station as the delivery point?”