Rebecca Dallman and Jena Butler were looking for a new business in early 2021 after the pandemic brought their commercial cleaning work to a halt. The two women already had years of experience working together as president and vice president of The Cleaning Bug, Ocala, Florida cleaning company.
Their next business began with a pallet of packages.
Dallman and Butler had been looking through an online auction site when they came across a pallet of undeliverable and unclaimed packages. Retailers and logistics companies sometimes dispose of merchandise this way after packages cannot be delivered or returned to their intended recipients. The women bought the pallet with a fairly conventional resale plan: open the packages, figure out what was inside and list the individual items for sale online.
They soon discovered how much work that would require. Every package had to be opened and sorted. The contents needed to be photographed, listed and eventually packed and shipped again. The merchandise itself could also be strange or difficult to sell.
“We had a lot of ‘What do we do with this?’ type of moments,” Butler later told The Wall Street Journal.
The idea that became Fun Delivered emerged at a garage sale. Dallman and Butler were selling some of the merchandise when a shopper noticed the unopened packages and asked to buy one. Butler warned him that they did not know what was inside. That was exactly what interested him. He bought several packages, and other shoppers began doing the same.
Instead of doing all the work required to turn unknown merchandise into ordinary resale inventory, Dallman and Butler could sell the unknown package itself.
They started Fun Delivered from a Florida garage in May 2021. The company was formally registered that month, with Dallman and Butler as its two principals. Customers bought boxes containing several unopened packages and discovered what they had received only after opening them.
The contents varied widely because the company was buying merchandise that had fallen out of the normal retail system. A box might contain clothing, electronics, household goods or something made for a person the customer had never met. The condition could vary too. Fun Delivered made no promise that the merchandise inside would be worth more than the box itself.
That uncertainty became the basis of the business. Customers began opening the packages together at family gatherings, parties and date nights. Others filmed the process and posted the results online. By late 2024, Fun Delivered had sold more than 90,000 boxes, each containing at least six packages, while its social-media accounts had accumulated more than 1 million followers combined.
As Fun Delivered grew, its inventory expanded beyond unopened undeliverable packages. Its boxes now draw from unclaimed shipments, customer returns, canceled orders and excess merchandise. Items that arrive without usable packaging or with damaged packaging can be wrapped again by Fun Delivered employees before being placed in a mystery box.
The operation grew with the volume of packages. By September 2026, the company said it had shipped more than 150,000 mystery boxes nationwide since its start in the garage. Dallman remains the company’s chief executive and Butler its chief operating officer. More than five years after they bought their first pallet, Fun Delivered still rests on the idea they stumbled across at that garage sale: the surprise itself was the product.
