For the last 20 years, they’ve been eating and breathing tech. Now there are a lot more opportunities in Israel. “Up to 15 years ago, all the licensed and insured companies were Israelis’ - Moishe’s, FlatRate, Shleppers,” he said. “I came here because of music and ended up working as a schlepper,” he said. A progressive-jazz musician, he’d come to New York from Tel Aviv in the summer of 1998 and, within a few days of arriving, found a day job as a mover in Gowanus. When I met with Rachmany in a coffee shop by the Brooklyn Navy Yard - Dumbo moved its operations to Flushing Avenue and North Oxford Street after rents in its namesake neighborhood exploded - he was wearing a Sarajevo 1984 Olympics T-shirt with a picture of a ski jumper on the front, his long dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail, drinking his fourth black coffee of the day. “Piece of Cake is the winner right now, and Lior knows it,” said one moving-company founder.
#Yelp moving companies software#
This has led some in the industry to wonder whether Piece of Cake is guilty of stealing Dumbo’s software or simply all its other ideas. Even assuming there’s enough business to go around between the two of them - a big if given that kind of business model - only one can be truly dominant. Questions of stolen software aside, Piece of Cake was following the game plan that Dumbo had laid out a decade earlier: Charge less than your competitors, and make your money on volume. That would have been galling under any circumstances, but it was made all the more so by the fact that, in the past few years, Piece of Cake’s pink trucks have become as ubiquitous on the streets of Brooklyn as Dumbo’s green ones. This was not hard to do, as Rachmany claims Popovic’s team had gained unauthorized access to Dumbo’s customer database. The competitor not only used that product to run its own company, the suit alleges, but to undercut Dumbo, tweaking its price-setting algorithm so it could woo Dumbo’s customers with cheaper quotes. The suit claims that Piece of Cake’s founder, Vojin Popovic, and two other former Dumbo managers stole proprietary software that Dumbo paid more than $100,000 to develop. This spring, Dumbo filed a lawsuit against Piece of Cake, alleging intellectual-property theft. 3 is our good friends from Piece of Cake.” They saw the success and wanted to get in on it.” And No.
Second, “the market is saturated because of last year’s boom - in the last year, over 30 moving companies incorporated. First, there is less work to go around, because people aren’t moving as much - they’re hunkering down in their apartments to wait out the terrible rental market.
“This last year, I’m not taking a salary.” He attributed the rough period to three things. “Expansion these days has been a lot more challenging. Rachmany was, in the words of one former employee, “the king of the moving companies.” But since last summer, things have taken a turn. In August 2021, it had hit a new record of 400 moves per day, grown to a fleet of 150 trucks in the city and 30 long-haul tractor-trailers, and expanded to more than a million square feet of storage space - “owned, not leased,” Rachmany noted. Until recently, Dumbo had been winning in lots of ways. He didn’t want to gloat, but last season, Dumbo had been league champion. I fell on the floor so many times.” That, he added, was an unusual occurrence. “The last time, they came just to hurt us. “Hopefully, they’re more sportive tonight,” said Lior Rachmany, Dumbo’s founder and CEO. “It’s them.” Dumbo had recently sued Piece of Cake, which was founded by a former Dumbo mover in 2017, for misappropriation of trade secrets, and Dumbo players said the previous soccer match between the companies had taken on an unsportsmanlike edge - Dumbo’s best player had been tackled from behind, disabling him for the rest of the game. “Do you know who this company is?” one Dumbo mover whispered to another. Players from Dumbo Moving and Storage warmed up on one side of the field as the Piece of Cake team, in the company’s signature colors - hot pink and purple - did drills on the other. On a soccer field in McCarren Park, two rival moving companies were getting ready to face off in a more visceral fashion. It was late May, the height of New York’s peak moving season, when double-parked trucks clutter the streets of Brooklyn, their logos providing a crude ranking of their competitive strength.
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