Our story
The Story of SKU.io
SKU.io wasn’t planned as a company. It started as one seller’s answer to software that kept failing him — and ran his business for a decade before anyone else could buy it.
- 1996 through 2008
Learning to build
Kalvin Mizzi taught himself HTML in middle school and was building websites by 1996. A copy of "ASP for Dummies" turned static pages into dynamic ones; a shopping-cart site built for fun turned into freelance work for e-commerce retailers — twelve years of building for other people’s stores, and a close look at how online selling actually works.
- 2008 the store
A store of his own
He started an e-commerce business of his own. It grew into a multi-million-dollar, multi-channel operation — and it still runs today. Growth exposed the tooling problem fast: too much manual re-entry, numbers that couldn’t be trusted, accounting disconnected from inventory.
- 2008 so he built one
The internal ERP
So he coded his own — purchasing, inventory, channel listings, and accounting in one system, built to cut operating costs and remove manual steps. The business grew 25–50% per month and passed $1M in sales in year one. Competitors stalled or imploded at exactly that revenue level; the system he’d built for himself was the difference.
- 2019 a product
Becoming a product
Friends who saw the system kept saying the same thing: other sellers need this. Making it true meant a full rebuild for SaaS — so, with his own business still running on the original, he hired a small team of developers and took the product-design seat himself. That rebuild became SKU.io.
- 2021 first customers
First customers
The first outside company, another multi-million-dollar seller, went live in 2021. The pattern set then still holds: hands-on onboarding, direct access to the people who write the code, and features shaped by what real operations need — often shipped within days of being asked for.
- Today still an operator
Still an operator
Kalvin still runs his own store on SKU.io, and he still gives every demo personally. The product is judged by the same test it started with: does it work for an operator with real orders, real suppliers, and real money on the line.
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