International Trade & Logistics
For years I ran international shipping operations end to end. Getting goods from a factory floor on the other side of the world onto a shelf here, and doing it without the whole thing falling apart in transit.
People hear "international trade" and picture something glamorous. Containers gliding across the ocean, deals struck in far-off ports. The reality is a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of phone calls at odd hours because of time zones, and an inbox full of documents that all have to be exactly right or your shipment sits. I loved it anyway. There is something satisfying about moving a physical thing halfway around the planet and having it show up when and where you said it would.
Moving freight, by ocean and by air
I owned the shipping side from one end to the other. That meant working directly with carriers and freight forwarders, booking ocean containers when the timeline allowed and the budget cared more about cost than speed, and falling back to air freight when something had to be here yesterday and we could stomach the bill. Routing was a constant trade-off. Which port, which lane, which transshipment, how many days at each leg, and what happens to the rest of the schedule if any single piece slips.
You learn fast that the cheapest quote on paper is rarely the cheapest shipment once you count the demurrage, the detention, the rebooking fees, and the cost of a customer waiting. I got good at reading those second-order costs before they hit.
Customs and compliance, the unglamorous core
This is the part nobody brags about, and it is the part that will sink you. I handled customs and compliance directly, including ISF 10+2 import filings. If you have not lived it, the Importer Security Filing has to be transmitted to U.S. Customs before the cargo is even loaded on the vessel overseas, and getting it wrong or getting it late means real penalties. So you chase down the exact details from the supplier, the manufacturer, the consolidator, and you file it clean and on time, every single time.
Beyond the ISF there was the rest of it: classifying goods correctly, understanding the tariffs that applied and how a change in trade policy could swing landed cost overnight, and keeping the documentation airtight. Commercial invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, certificates of origin. One mismatched number across those documents and a container gets held for examination, which costs you days and money you did not plan for. I treated the paperwork as part of the product, because at the border it is.
Sourcing and supplier management
The freight only matters if you are buying the right things from the right people. I managed overseas sourcing and procurement, finding and vetting suppliers, negotiating terms, and building the kind of working relationships that hold up when something goes sideways. And something always goes sideways. A supplier relationship is not a contract you sign once. It is a thing you maintain, through quality questions, through revised specs, through the awkward conversation about why the last batch was late.
Doing this across borders and languages and time zones taught me to be precise about what I asked for and patient about how I asked for it. Assumptions are expensive when a misunderstanding takes three weeks of ocean transit to reveal itself.
Then COVID happened
I did a lot of this work straight through the COVID supply-chain meltdown, which is where you really find out whether you know what you are doing. Lead times that used to be reliable simply blew up. Container costs spiked to numbers that made no sense. Ports backed up, sailings got cancelled, and routes I had used for years stopped being options.
The job became improvisation against a constantly moving target. Reroute around the congestion. Switch a critical order to air because the ocean lane had become a parking lot. Hunt for an alternate supplier when the primary one shut down. Have the honest conversation about which orders we could actually keep promises on. It was stressful and it was exhausting, and I am quietly proud that we kept goods moving when the easy answer would have been to throw up our hands and blame the world. The world was, in fairness, a mess. You still had to get the freight in.
Why it still shapes how I work
Logistics rewires how you think. You stop trusting that things will just work and start building in the buffers, the backups, and the visibility to catch a problem before it becomes a crisis. That instinct carries straight into the systems and integration work I do now. Whether it is a container or a data feed, the discipline is the same: know the dependencies, watch the handoffs, and never assume a process is fine just because nobody is complaining yet.
That is the trade and logistics side of what I do. There is more on the rest of my background, and a bit about how I think, on the pages below.