Between March 25 and 30, I didn't sleep much. Nobody tells you when you're neurodivergent that sleep sometimes just... doesn't happen. Your brain decides 4am is a great time to be fully operational, and you have two choices: fight it or lean in.
I leaned in. Specifically, I leaned into live chat with vendor reps on Alibaba, DHgate, and Made-in-China.com.
It was the middle of the night in Canada, which meant it was peak business hours overseas, and the reps were available, talkative, and honestly? Thrilled to be chatting with a Canadian. That reaction caught me off guard. So I started asking questions.
What percentage of your sales come from Canada?
The answer, across every platform, every rep, every conversation — was less than 10%.
I pushed further. Why so low? The answer was consistent: Canadian buyers almost always come through American distributors. The sale gets logged as a US transaction. Canada barely shows up in their numbers — not because Canadians aren't buying, but because we're buying through a middleman we didn't choose and probably don't know exists.
Then the tariff conversation came up. Several reps mentioned that their US sales have been dipping — goods that were normally purchased by American distributors and then resold into Canada are now getting caught up in the trade war. The pipeline Canadians unknowingly depended on is getting squeezed, and overseas vendors are actively looking for new direct markets.
Canada keeps coming up in those conversations. But nobody's built the infrastructure to actually catch that interest.
Our own Prime Minister has noted that Canada is a middle market country. That framing stuck with me — because middle market doesn't mean unimportant, it means underleveraged. We have purchasing power, we have demand, and we have a gap where a direct supply relationship should exist.
That gap is what Parcel Theory is being built around. The logistics piece is first — because you can't build a direct supply lane without solving how goods actually move. But the bigger picture is becoming clearer every week.
Apparently it only takes a week of lost sleep and a neurodivergent brain that refuses to quit to see it.