PORT READING, NEW JERSEY — When Rostyslav Kisil was pondering his idea to enable North America’s Ukrainian diaspora to more easily ship parcels to their relatives in Soviet Ukraine, he imagined the service as a bridge that spanned two continents.
And thus the name Meest, which means bridge in Ukrainian, became the natural choice for the name of the new company.
That first bridge started in Toronto in 1989, linking Canada and Ukraine. The company grew rapidly and started operating in the United States in 1995. Since then, the Meest Group has expanded to embrace 22 countries. This autumn it will celebrate its 30th anniversary.
Kisil, born and raised in Lviv, came to Canada in 1988 on his first trip abroad to visit his uncle, Stepan Kisil, who left Ukraine during World War II.
He was astonished by how much people in the diaspora cared about Ukraine. One of the ways tens of thousands of people demonstrated that care was by regularly sending parcels containing items that were scarce or too expensive for their relatives in Ukraine – such things as good quality clothes, jeans, warm boots for winter, hats and scarves, cloth, needles and thread for people to sew their own garments, vitamins and medicines, basic foodstuffs like flour, rice and dry beans.
The dispatching process from Western countries was straightforward, using normal postal services with a lot of paperwork. However, at the Soviet end, they had to pay expensive customs duties and the communist officials processed everything painfully slowly and often deliberately caused damage to the contents.
Eye-opening visit to Canada
Kisil’s first three-week stay in Canada transformed how he thought about the world. He and his uncle made plans to form a company that simplified sending parcels or anything else to Ukraine.
Loading packages at a Meest warehouse in Kyiv. The idea for Meest was born with a trip in 1988 by its Ukrainian president, Rostyslav Kisil, to visit his uncle in Canada. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Back in Ukraine he decided to quit a senior job in the state-owned construction sector despite being threatened with all sorts of dire consequences. But he said he did not care as he was “obsessed” by the Meest idea and searched for partners to help in the project.
In 1988, with a collapsing economy, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev desperately attempted to salvage the communist state through “perestroika” reforms that introduced limited political freedoms and allowed a severely-restricted form of private enterprise.
After a year of fighting Moscow bureaucracy, he registered Meest as the first Soviet-Canadian joint venture in the autumn of 1989.
Kisil returned to Canada a couple of months after the first trip and flew there every two months as he and his uncle and a number of other Ukrainian-Canadians built up the business. For 15 years after the company moved into the U.S. in 1995, he divided his time between monthly stints in Ukraine, Canada and Meest’s New Jersey American base.
After Ukrainian independence, the nature of the goods being transported altered as the need for the subsistence type packages of old declined. Commercial cargoes of sea and air freight joined the packages, letters and gifts sent by private individuals.
The company grew so rapidly it had to move three times within New Jersey each time because of the need for ever-larger warehouses.
Kisil spoke to the Kyiv Post at the company’s main American location in Port Reading, New Jersey. The Port Reading premises cover America’s east coast while warehouses and offices in Chicago and Los Angeles cover America’s central zone and west coast respectively. More than 400 agents act as local collection points for customers to drop off parcels across the U.S.
As the company mushroomed, Kisil devolved much responsibility to local managers around the world but still presides at regular gatherings of his key personnel. He was in Port Reading in April, where executives had flown in from around the world to discuss plans for developing the company. One of their most important decisions was to expand operations to Brazil and Argentina, this year.
E-commerce boosts Meest’s business
A critical turning point for Meest’s expansion was the introduction of “e-commerce” – the shipping of goods ordered by customers online. One of the people instrumental in making that happen is Natalia Brandafi, based at Port Reading.
Originally from Rohatyn in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast in western Ukraine, she came to the U.S. as a student in 1993 and began work at Meest in 1996 as a customer service representative in New Jersey – at that time its only U.S facility, staffed by six people.
By 1998 she became manager of Meest’s New Jersey operation in 1998 and gained an MBA in supply chain management. She became fascinated by the then pioneering retail internet field and explored ways Meest could apply the new technology “to adopt an entirely different business model based on e-commerce.”
Kisil said e-commerce has been the driving force in the company’s rapid development since 2005.
Brandafi, who became chief operating officer in 2010, explained that customers register with Meest and buy goods online from anywhere giving one of the Meest centers as the initial delivery point for the online retailer.
Meest then handles the rest from there, she said. Staff open everything to ensure that goods are what they claim to be and comply with legal regulations. They repackage them and deal with customs and paperwork in the countries along the route. The goods are delivered to recipients or collected by them from a Meest office.
Port Reading is Meest’s biggest and busiest center, with some 70 employees serving up to 6,000 customers each month.
Meest staff sorting packages at the company’s warehouse in Kyiv. The company employs some 3,000 people in Ukraine. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Scores of staff sort through 400,000 kilograms of goods there monthly. Most are stacked in orderly rows of shelves in its huge warehouse but there are always a few used cars being prepared for transportation. The staff determine the cost of shipping and notify the customer, mostly by Internet communication. Once the customer is happy with the quoted price the goods are dispatched by air from New Jersey’s Newark Airport or JFK Airport in neighboring New York or loaded into containers for transport by sea from ports on the nearby Atlantic coastline.
Consumer sites like the Better Business Bureau have logged complaints from customers about lost or damaged packages, lack of compensation for their losses and rudeness by some staff in phone communications. Brandafi said that it tries to settle customer issues rapidly and amicably.
Some 80 percent of the shipments from Port Reading go to Ukraine and Ukraine-related business still accounts for the bulk of Meest’s worldwide operations.
Meest has centers in 22 countries, operating in most former USSR countries, as well as Israel, Turkey, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Britain and China. It employs some 3,000 people in Ukraine and hundreds of others throughout the world. Its name varies slightly depending on location. In Ukraine it is called Meest Express.
Kisil said Meest has worked in China for eight years. “It has become a very important country for us and is the largest source of our e-commerce business.”
He said that an increasing amount of Meest’s “postal-logistic services” involves e-commerce between customers ordering and shipping goods to and fro countries that have nothing to do with Ukraine, say between North America and China.
“The share of business involving other countries is growing larger. In the future I see our main service as being the dispatch and delivery of e-commerce,” said Kisil. “Our services are unique in the world and there aren’t any analogous companies or rivals. I believe we will attain a leading position on the international market for postal-logistic services. We will allow customers to buy items online all over the world and we will deliver them straight into their hands.”
Help for Ukraine’s revolutions
Kisil comes from a nationally conscious family some of whose members fell victim to Stalin-era persecution and calls himself “a nationalist and a patriot of Ukraine.” He was acquainted with leaders of Ukraine’s “Rukh” independence movement, active in the late 1980s and in the 1990s and is a member of the KUN political party – the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists – although he has no political ambitions his own.
A Meest employee amidst some of the thousands of private and commercial freight packages the company deals with daily. Delivering Internet retail purchases has boosted the company’s success. (Volodymyr Petrov)
In its early days Meest provided a channel of communication between the diaspora and Rukh leaders and transported assistance to the political activists.
Kisil, Brandafi and other Meest employees are openly patriotic about Ukraine and proud that during the 2004 Orange Revolution and again during the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin president, they waived their fees to transport a large proportion of vital supplies, including medicines and medical equipment, clothing, sleeping bags, even helmets, donated by Ukrainian communities in the West to the demonstrators.
Meest has continued to help ship tons of medicines and equipment donated to help Ukraine’s war effort against Russia and assist in the rehabilitation of wounded Ukrainian soldiers. It also supports a variety of social projects dealing with purely civilian needs including homes for orphans, helping to build schools and treatment for children suffering from cerebral palsy.
“We donate significant amounts of money to these various causes. Why? Because we make money and we think that we ought to share some of this with those helping our community,” Kisil said.
Meest’s turnover is in the hundreds of millions of dollars with a very healthy profit but Kisil did not want to go into details.
He said Meest is regularly audited by “the Big Four” and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is one of its creditors – something, Kisil believes, means his company meets high international standards.
Meest is considering proposals to join the stock exchanges in London, Toronto or New York but Kisil estimates any initial public offering will not happen before 2021.
