Here's a fun fact about Bold Tech founder Joey: when he's not building internal tools, he's scaling actual walls. He's such a climbing enthusiast that he even owns a small e-commerce store selling the gear.
Now, imagine being the founder of an agency that builds efficiency tools for other companies and noticing that inefficient shipping costs were eating 44% of your eCommerce profit. That's like being a personal trainer who takes the elevator. So, naturally, he built Box-it in Retool to save himself thousands on shipping. Because if you can't practice what you preach, what's the point?
What’s more, this app won him the Retool December Shipping Spree competition ‘Move the Needle’ award for Best Business Impact. So without further ado, you can go ahead and watch the demo, or read more below.
How Joey cut shipping costs by 35% with a custom box optimization app
A week-long build that saves his small business $24,000 per year.
Like most small online retailers, Joey uses Shopify for everything: sales, inventory, fulfillment. It's been great for getting his business off the ground, but, after his Black Friday sale last year, he realized he had a serious problem.
He'd just shipped over 100 parcels in a single week and spent more than $9,000 doing it. When he crunched the numbers, Joey discovered that 44% of his gross profit was disappearing into shipping costs on boxes that were just too big. He was literally paying to ship air. His package sizing was completely unoptimized, and international orders were the worst offenders. A single shipment to Asia could cost him over $400 because of oversized packaging.
The problem nobody's solved.
Joey figured there had to be a tool out there to help small businesses optimize their packaging. Surely someone had built this, right? After scouring the internet, he was shocked to discover that no such solution exists for businesses of his size.
Then he learned why: we actually can't solve this problem mathematically.
The package optimization challenge is what's called an NP-hard problem. Despite packing millions of boxes every day globally, no algorithm can find the absolutely perfect solution. We can only get close. But even getting close would save Joey a fortune, so he decided to build his own solution.
The result? Box-it, a custom package optimizer Joey built in less than a week using Retool. With just the first version, he's already saving 35% on shipping costs and has increased his net profit by 17%.
Building for 80%, not 100%.
Through his experience running an agency that's built hundreds of apps in Retool, Joey has learned something crucial: the best internal business tools get you 80% of the way to a perfect solution, but can be built extremely fast. These often move the needle more than "perfect" solutions that take a year and a whole development team to build.
Retool lets builders solve business problems and iterate on solutions dramatically faster than traditional coding. Within a week, Joey had a working package optimizer. That $410 shipment to Japan he mentioned? With Box-it's recommended packaging, he could have saved $235.
Solving the unsolvable
Joey started by adding dimension metadata to his Shopify products, then connected Retool to Shopify via their dev store API.
The real puzzle was the packing algorithm. Since finding the absolute optimal solution would require impossible amounts of computing power, Joey settled on a series of heuristics (educated guesses based on proven patterns). Fortunately, his products come in rectangular boxes, which simplifies things compared to items that can be stacked or compressed irregularly.
His algorithm tests six possible layout configurations, like stacking items vertically or placing the two largest items on the bottom. But here's the twist: shipping providers don't just charge by box size. They use "dimensional weight," which factors in both dimensions and actual weight. With help from AI, Joey built a JavaScript transformer that calculates dimensional weight for each layout option and selects the winner: the configuration that would be cheapest to ship.
Iterating toward the real solution
The first version worked well, but it had a flaw: it might recommend a box size Joey didn't have in stock, and he couldn’t exactly stock every possible box size.
The real question wasn't "what's the smallest possible box?" It was "what small set of box sizes would cover most of our orders cheaply?"
This is where Retool really shines. Joey could quickly iterate and add a box recommendation feature. This algorithm now analyzes his last 100 orders and suggests six optimal box sizes to keep in stock. He then built a simple inventory management CRUD using a Retool database, ordered those six boxes, and updated the algorithm to work with what he actually has on hand.
The results
For December alone, Joey's business spent $5,600 on shipping. With Box-it, that would have been $3,670, a saving of over $2,000 in a single month. He's reduced shipping from 44% of net profit to just 27%.
For a small business like his, this translates to over $24,000 in annual savings, and that number will grow as he scales.
The best part? As Joey adds new products, he just needs to include their dimensions in Shopify, and the algorithm handles everything automatically. Even the 3D Plotly visualizer he built shows his team exactly how to pack each box according to the winning layout.
This app demonstrates what's possible when you focus on building fast and iterating quickly. Not bad for a week's work.
