You can say Endicia began in a Stanford University classroom. Associate Professor Harry Whitehouse needed a teaching assistant for his class, and his student – Amine Khechfé – wanted “in” on the job.
At first, Harry turned Amine down; rules said he couldn’t hire a student currently enrolled in the course. But soon Harry changed his mind:
“Amine was the most experienced and the most determined. It made sense he get the job.”
This casual disregard of convention underpins Harry and Amine’s relationship – one that started in the classroom, but quickly expanded to the business arena.
Harry began giving Amine projects – energy simulations for post offices, engineering tasks on the side – and this student/teacher duo soon morphed into a technology consultancy called PSI Associates. One of their first clients just happened to be the United States Postal Service®.
Working with the USPS gave Harry and Amine an insider’s look at where mail and shipping were headed.
Their first innovation – Envelope Manager – became the corporate standard for address cleansing. And their next project – a software solution that could print POSTNET barcodes on envelopes – would plant the seed for Endicia.
Harry began thinking: if the Postal Service™ could print routing barcodes and postage on its outgoing mail, then why couldn’t business owners print stamps right from their homes? He began tinkering with a solution and, in 1991, filed a patent for PC Postage.
Four years later, the patent was granted and Endicia was born, right at the height of the dot-com boom and blossoming of ecommerce. Since then, Harry and Amine have worked relentlessly to keep their software fresh – building the first shipping platform exclusively for Mac, adding Amazon and eBay integration to the mix, developing a Pay-on-Use Returns solution for USPS shippers, and much more. In Amine’s words:
“We’re engineers by trade and problem-solvers at heart – nothing’s more thrilling than tackling the challenges of ecommerce.”
Today, Endicia is part of the Stamps.com family of companies and remains the leading provider of e-commerce shipping technologies and services with more than $14 billion in USPS postage printed. Its customers, large and small, rely on the software every day to help them deliver goods to shoppers across the United States.