World Exchange origins actually go back about 5 years before the doors officially opened. On a sun-soaked Tahitian beach in 1991 while sharing tropical drinks with a friend who owned a hotel on the island, Frank Gomez was engaged in a conversation about the difficulty of sourcing good quality linens for, not just his hotel but for all the hotels on the island. The friend shared that, as the popularity of their hotels were increasing, they were having a hard time obtaining towels and linens and that the local market just could not keep up with demand. In that moment, the idea for World Exchange was born.
While the Tahitian towel and linen market was eventually cornered by cheaper Chinese imports, the idea of founding a logistics company stuck with Frank, and over the next few years, he began refining the idea. Finally, in January of 1996, World Exchange officially opened its doors near LAX. Initially offering Customs brokerage and freight forwarding, the company stripped the forwarding services away fairly early on in order to focus on its core competency of Customs brokerage.
As the company grew to include importer clients like Mattel and D-Link Systems, Frank saw a potential new market with several local freight forwarders. They were in need of high quality, reliable Customs brokerage services for some of their more challenging clients, and World Exchange was the perfect solution for their increasingly growing problem. Over the course of the next several years, World Exchange would become the main Customs brokerage partner to over 80 freight forwarding firms all over the world.
More recently, World Exchange has spun off its consulting services like C-TPAT advisement and FP&F cases into a sister company named Problem Solvers. This realignment of services has allowed World Exchange to take a renewed focus on the main service that built the company in the first place; Customs brokerage. With this renewed focus, World Exchange has invested heavily into new technological systems and capabilities as well as into our staff with ever expanding training and education that will help usher in the next successful chapter for the company. The future holds many exciting opportunities World Exchange!