OCALA, FL (352Today.com) – Rebecca Dallman once believed the only way to success ran through medical school or a law degree. During the early months of the pandemic, Dallman and her wife Jena Butler were running a cleaning company that kept them working nights when they bid on a pallet of sealed unclaimed mail with no idea what was inside. Five years later, two Ocala women are walking onto ABC’s “Shark Tank” with mega-influencer MrBeast among the investors.
Fundelivered will be featured on Wednesday, September 30, at 9 p.m. on ABC as part of the Season 18 premiere of Shark Tank, titled “Beast Mode.” Dallman, the company’s chief executive, and Butler, its chief operating officer, will pitch a mystery-box business built on unclaimed mail, customer returns, and liquidation merchandise—goods that never reached the original buyer and would otherwise pile up in warehouses or landfills. Across from them will be Barbara Corcoran, Kevin O’Leary, Lori Greiner, Daniel Lubetzky, Jeffrey Housenbold, and guest shark Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTube entrepreneur known as MrBeast.
“I’ve watched the show since I was a little girl,” Dallman said. “I can speak for Jena and I both. They’re all somewhat my heroes.”
Keeping the appearance a secret took nearly nine months. The pair attended an open casting call in Las Vegas in January, filmed their pitch in June, and did not learn until Sept. 9 that the episode would actually air. That gap left them progressing through each stage without any guarantee the country would ever see it.
“It’s been a really difficult secret to keep, but I’m really happy that we can finally share, because I feel like a huge weight is being lifted off my shoulders,” Dallman said. “When we finally got the green light, everything else before then was, ‘you’re progressing along the stages, but nothing’s written in stone yet.’ You know, you’re still not guaranteed. So it’s just such a cliffhanger the whole time.”
A sad season, a sealed pallet, and a bottle of wine
The product pitch traces back to one night in February 2021. Dallman and Butler were running a medical cleaning company that kept them working late. During the day, Dallman was clearing out her house and selling belongings on Poshmark when they found a liquidation website and a listing that caught their eye. The listing was for a pallet of unclaimed mail, sold with almost no description of what was inside.
“Of course that piqued my curiosity, because I had never heard of that before,” she said. “We bid on it, and the idea was that we didn’t know what was in it. Everything was sealed. It was really thrilling. Of course, the idea of winning an auction was exciting, but then I was thinking, what is coming our way? We have no idea.”
Friends thought they had lost their minds. They opened the pallet anyway.
“We cracked a bottle of wine. We had the best time. It was literally like every single thing you picked up, you had no idea what to expect; you opened it up. It was really the first Fundelivered experience, and at the time, we didn’t know what it would become.”
The curiosity of ‘what happens to this merchandise if nobody bids on it’ pulled them into reverse logistics, the unglamorous pipeline of returns, failed deliveries, and overstock that retailers would otherwise write off. Formally, reverse logistics is the process of moving goods backward through the supply chain, such as through returns, undeliverable packages, and leftover inventory, after the original sale or delivery has already failed.
They registered Fundelivered in May 2021, packed smaller versions of that first unboxing, put the idea on social media, and watched orders arrive faster than the garage could keep up.
“It blew up like overnight,” Dallman said. “We had to instantly try and find a supply chain that we could regularly purchase from to keep up with the demand, and we still to this day are demand-driven.”
Garage summers, Sharpie markers, and 32 people on payroll
The early months were long days and longer nights in a garage with no air conditioning. Dallman had to learn a tape gun from scratch. They burned through cases of Sharpies trying to black out customer information on mailers before they realized a heat gun worked on thermal labels. “We always cranked the music. We had LED lights going, and we had this pact. If anything was random or weird, or if we found any cool stickers or whatnot on packages that felt empty, we put them all over our walls. Our garage was filled with really random things and butterflies on the wall. It was a really fun environment.”
While the creativity gave them the juice to keep going, Dallman recalled many learning curves that weren’t so fun.
“People don’t realize, or they might underestimate, that we weren’t just throwing things into a box,” she said. “It was just a series of learning curves. It was grueling, but it was so fun. It felt like we were doing something that nobody else was doing, and we were on the brink of something cool.”
They sold the cleaning company in 2023. Fundelivered now employs about 32 people, some of whom followed them from the old business. The company has shipped more than 150,000 mystery boxes. A second warehouse in a more central part of the country has been discussed only as a way to cut freight costs, because every box includes free shipping. Leaving Ocala is not on the calendar.
“I don’t think that we’ll ever leave Ocala, not in the near future, or not even on the horizon,” Dallman said.
For someone who has never ordered a mystery box, she describes the purchase this way: “With Fundelivered, you’re buying a really fun, shareable experience that blends the line between retail and entertainment.”
The goods come from fulfillment warehouses across the United States where returned and undeliverable product accumulates by the truckload. They do not know the contents of every package they buy.
The wildest item Dallman has personally seen described from the sorting floor is a taxidermied two-headed duckling. The find that made her jump was a complete, signed collection of Taylor Swift albums. The bleakest loads, she said, arrive soaked in detergent or otherwise ruined, product that was headed for a landfill until her team pulled out what could still be saved.
“Fundelivered has a really green advantage and plays a part in the circular retail economy,” she said. “Disappointing for me is how some of these items were destined for landfill, and they’re just broken or destroyed, and from our perspective, we have to sort those out, and we clean up the mess, and we get to salvage as much as we can.”
Date nights and family game nights were a marketing hook. Dallman said that is how they marketed the box from the start, because that is how they had experienced the first pallet themselves as a group of people in a room, opening sealed packages together, during a year when concerts and crowded nights out were hard to come by because of COVID-19.
No blueprint, a folding table in Vegas, and eyes on Lori Greiner
Almost from the first conversations about the business, strangers told them they belonged on “Shark Tank.” They waited until they believed the numbers could survive the room, then treated the January casting call as a shot in the dark. The room where they waited was not private. It was a conference room where they had to wait three to five hours before delivering a 60-second pitch at a folding table while the rest of the crowd watched.
“It was really, really nerve-wracking, to say the least,” Dallman said. “As soon as we were finished, I kind of had an idea. I thought, okay, this one’s going to go somewhere. Like it went really, really well. So it made my nerves instantly go away.”
Getting there required ignoring a lot of advice. Neither woman had a background in retail, e-commerce, or social media marketing. Industry people told them the model would not work. Truckloads arrived as the wrong product. There were, she said, hundreds of reasons to quit.
“Jena and I had absolutely no experience in retail and e-commerce or social media marketing, and so everything is, and still is, a learning curve,” she said. “In the beginning, no one else was doing it. There was no blueprint to follow. We faced a lot of doubt. We’ve gotten truckloads of merchandise that were supposed to have been one type of product and ended up being something different. There were probably hundreds of reasons why we should have quit in the beginning, but we really saw this vision, and of course it’s coming to life.”
A deal, if one comes, is supposed to do more than put money in the account. They want national brands to treat Fundelivered as a legitimate channel for dead stock instead of writing the goods off as waste.
“Our main goal of going on ‘Shark Tank’ was to get exposure so that brands across the country and across the world can see Fundelivered as an outlet for what they might consider waste or dead stock to them,” Dallman said, “and encourage the green aspect of Fundelivered, and that it might not be more profitable to throw things away than sell them to Fundelivered.”
The shark they have studied most closely is Lori Greiner.
“I definitely have our eyes on Lori. Her product knowledge and the fact that she’s the QVC queen,” Dallman said. “Back to our goal of getting brands to recognize that Fundelivered is an outlet and a good one for this merchandise, I think she has a really great platform for it, so that’s what we’re hoping for.”
Cuban was the name that lit up the screen when she was younger. He is no longer on the panel. MrBeast is, and that booking is why they have added staff, inventory, and technical capacity ahead of the premiere.
“I’m not sure that any small business can truly be ready to capture all the business that could come from being in a season premiere of Shark Tank,” she said. “But we are as ready as we’re going to be. We’ve amped up our staff. We’ve amped up our supply. We were getting orders out faster. They finally announced that the guest shark on the season premiere is MrBeast, and so we’re expecting a huge increase in traffic on our site. We’ve gotten the tech team ready. We are as ready as we will ever be.”
What she wants Marion County to take from it
Both women graduated from the University of Florida with degrees in business management. Dallman spent her freshman year on a pre-med track before she transferred.
“When I went into college, we both attended the University of Florida, and I thought the only true way to be successful in life was to be a doctor or a lawyer,” she said. “And here I am, proof that that’s not true. You can follow your dreams. Anybody can. Any woman can that wants to be involved in business. It’s not something that’s exclusive, and hard work pays off.”
She decided after that first year that a decade of medical training on a pre-med track was the wrong shape for her life.
“We graduated with degrees in business management, so I quickly transferred from pre-med after my first year as a freshman. I thought, ‘There’s no way I’m going to do [medical] for 10 years. I’m too creative. I want to do something crazy,'” she said.
That is the advice she hopes lands locally.
“I hope that it inspires younger women to go into business,” she said. “Ocala is a really big place, but it’s a small-town feel, and I’ve met so many people in Marion County, and I just have met a lot of people who are inspired by what Jena and I have done, and so I hope that continues.”
The Fundelivered segment airs Sept. 30 at 9 p.m. on ABC. (The company is hosting an invite-only watch party at the Ocala Civic Theatre.) Boxes and the rest of the catalog can be found at fundelivered.com.