Some people get famous for dancing in airports on TikTok, others for posing on fanciful pool floats on Instagram. Napoleon Suarez ’04 found a loyal following on YouTube, posting videos about life at the neighborhood mailbox store he runs in Philadelphia.
In one video, Suarez unveils the biggest package ever to arrive at the shop. In another, he describes how he raised money to start up the store, including selling a pile of shoes: “I was a big ‘sneaker head’ at the time. I had probably over a hundred pairs,” he says in the video. “I’m talking about all the hype stuff — all the Jordans, all the Air Maxes, the LeBrons. Some of them I hadn’t even worn before.”
This year, Suarez is celebrating the 10-year anniversary of his mailbox store, Fishbox, a place where people can arrange to have their letters or packages delivered — an extremely helpful service in a city where boxes often get swiped from stoops by “porch pirates.”
It’s a big problem in cities like Philly: A box gets plopped on a front step and disappears within minutes. People have tried all kinds of things to thwart the thieves — setting up lockers outside the front door or leaving notes for carriers to hide boxes in a trash can or behind a plant.
I live in Philly myself, on a city block where the pirates love to pilfer. A guy across the street once got so fed up, he tried to get revenge by placing a box full of dog doo on his stoop, hoping a thief would mistake it for a delivery, nab it, and get a rude surprise. But it didn’t quite work out: My husband spotted the box and thought he’d do our neighbor a favor and pick it up. Whoops.
Yes, the store run by Suarez helps people avoid all that. Parcels from local or national carriers like UPS and FedEx get dropped off for customers to pick up or have delivered at a time they choose. Mailbox stores have an advantage over post office boxes in that not all carriers will deliver to a P.O. box.
Fishbox has another key benefit as well: It’s a place with an old-fashioned sense of neighborliness and camaraderie, where people come in and shoot the breeze and maybe shoot some hoops with a little toy basketball.
“The customers have just been incredible,” Suarez says. “People invite me over for dinner. They tell me about their lives. We had a couple that just had a baby recently. They got all their registry stuff delivered here, diapers and everything. So, when the baby was born, they strolled Teddy in — they didn’t even want to pick up packages, they just wanted to show me the new baby. I just thought that was really cool.”
Suarez says it was his dream to make his business personal in the increasingly indifferent world of mail, to get to know his neighbors, to give back to the community. He wanted to go “old school,” he says, hearkening back to an era when “there was one post office in the town and they would know your name there and give your dog a treat.”
At one time he wouldn’t have thought any of this was possible. As a freshman on the track team at Notre Dame, he felt completely overwhelmed and unsure of his future. “Being an athlete, whether you’re a football player or a crew rower, it’s like a full-time job. I had some rough times at Notre Dame in the beginning,” he says. “I wasn’t great at balancing my time, being away from my family; I had some struggles academically.” Looking back, he says, “If I went back and did a poll and said, ‘Who would be the most likely to start their own business?’ I’d go as far as to say I would be the least likely.”
The story of how he turned things around, with the help of an adviser at Notre Dame — and how he helps other people launch their dream businesses, even if they might compete with his own — illustrates how lessons in kindness from the University can be carried forward, sometimes in unexpected ways.
* * *
“Hey, what’s up, Kirk?”
It’s around 5 p.m. on a Wednesday in April, and Suarez is doing his thing, greeting customers by name as they swing by after work to pick up their stuff. Located on a corner of the Queen Village neighborhood near the Delaware River waterfront, the shop sits amid an eclectic mix of streets, some lined with historic row houses, others with bars and tattoo parlors. The streets are just starting to turn pink with spring cherry blossoms.
Inside the shop the vibe is mellow, with the scent of cedary incense and the hum of electronic lo-fi music, an ambient blend of jazz and hip-hop that Suarez created himself. Shelves are stacked high with boxes, many from Chewy and Amazon. Suarez, tall and thin with expressive brown eyes, exudes a boyish enthusiasm as he chats with people who come through the door.
His current customer has a lament: “Made the mistake of delivering a package to my home last week.”
“Yeah, you did,” says Suarez.
“It sat outside for all of a damn hour before it was taken. An hour.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Suarez. The pirates strike again.
Another customer pops in. “Hey Brooke,” Suarez says. “How you doing today?”
“Good, how are you?”
“I’m hanging in there. Let’s see what we got,” Suarez says, checking his computer. “I think we got three pieces for you today.”
“Playing some basketball?” she asks, glancing at the ball on the counter.
“Oh yeah. You want to give it a shot?”
“I do.”
“Let’s see if you can sink one,” Suarez says. “You ready? Yeah. Do it. Do it.”
She aims at a little net attached to a box atop a shelf, scoring on the second shot.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Suarez says. “There we go.”
Suarez has around 500 customers at any given time, and he knows something unique about all of them. “If I saw them out on the street, I could say something on a personal level, each one of them.”
It’s not his first job in the mail world. Growing up in an African American and Ecuadorian military family in Presidential Lakes, New Jersey, he had a paper route for the Burlington County Times, which he describes as the “second-favorite job I ever had.” His eyes light up as he recalls how he got the gig. “I was around 12, 13 years old when I started being really into girls, and I felt that the best way for me to earn a girl’s attention at the time — because I didn’t know any better — was to have all the best shoes and the best clothes.”
He asked his father for money to buy a fancy pair of sneakers, and it became a defining moment: “He said the words that put me on my entrepreneur journey forever: ‘Get a job.’ It was kind of tongue-in-cheek. I think he just said it as a way to shut me up. But I took it at face value. I thought, OK, if I get a job, I can get the shoes.”
He went out and got not one but two paper routes, getting up at 5:30 a.m. to deliver some 60 newspapers before school. He kept the job through high school. Ultimately, the confidence he gained from the job, not the shoes, helped him to get a girlfriend, he says.
When it came time for college, he planned to go with his girlfriend to Rutgers. But when she broke his heart, he decided to accept a partial scholarship to join the track team at Notre Dame. Raised in a Catholic family, he had long been a fan of the school, sporting a Notre Dame jacket from his mother for years. And so, he headed off to South Bend. But his freshman year would come as a jolt.
* * *
“It was a huge, rude awakening,” Suarez says of his introduction to campus life at Notre Dame. “Everybody there is a salutatorian or valedictorian, everybody. The whole track team was full of All-Americans. It was great to be around that type of environment, but it was also a big shock to me.”
Juggling the demands of training and his studies proved difficult. He scheduled his classes for the morning so he could spend his afternoons training as a hurdler, putting him in a different universe than his friends in Keenan Hall: “While I was at practice, my friends were getting their work done, studying. So, I get home at 7 and I’m going to the dining hall when all my friends are done, ready to hang out.”
He missed classes and saw his grades slip to a point that threatened his future on the team. “If you fall below a certain GPA, you can’t compete,” he says. He worried he would get kicked out of school altogether. “It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work. I just think I was very immature when I got there; I was a kid.” He adds, “I still have nightmares about it — I was supposed to study the night before, and I’d wake up and realize I fell asleep with the book on my face.”
He credits an academic adviser, Mary Ann Spence, with helping him find his footing. She worked in the office of Academic Services for Student-Athletes, which offers counseling and tutoring. “Mary Ann was that person who would sit down with me once a month. She would tell me, ‘Napoleon, you’re smart. You can do this. You just have to have better time management,’” he says. “She stayed on top of me. If I had a finance test, she would call my dorm early in the morning and say, ‘Napoleon, are you awake?’ She would call my mother five minutes later, just to make sure I didn’t tell her I was awake and go back to sleep.”
Suarez pauses to help a customer in his shop. “Hey, what’s up, John?”
“What’s burning?” John replies, smelling the woodsy incense.
“A little palo santo,” Suarez says. “You like that? Hey, it’s not for everybody.”
“No, man,” he replies, laughing. “Do it for you.”
“All right, John. Enjoy the day, my friend,” Suarez says, handing over a box. “I’ll see you next time.”
Suarez returns to his story. “Mary Ann helped me get to where I needed to go. She really believed in me,” he says, recalling how she helped him switch his major from math to sociology, which was a better fit. “It allowed me to graduate in four years, which, considering how I started, was a tall test.”
I went looking for Mary Ann Spence and learned she had died in 2021, after serving more than 20 years as an academic adviser to student athletes. Chad Grotegut, the department’s assistant director, says he fondly remembers “her unwavering commitment to her students and genuine kindness,” which left “an indelible mark” on many lives.
In his senior year, Suarez won the NAACP male athlete of the year award for the Notre Dame chapter, marking one of his proudest accomplishments at the University. In retrospect, he says, going to Notre Dame “was the best decision that I ever made, even with all the struggles.”
* * *
After college, he bounced around in various jobs in sales and marketing but dreamed of being his own boss. “I wasn’t the 9-to-5, pleated-khakis type of guy,” he says. When he got tired of missing package deliveries at home, his mom suggested he do something about it instead of just complaining.
The idea of opening a neighborhood mailbox store came into focus. He had seen traditional mailbox stores where people shipped or picked up boxes, but he had ideas for taking the concept further, for instance by offering delivery as well as pickup services. But where would he get the money to start up his own business from scratch?
That’s when he got creative. He sold clothes, camera gear, gadgets. He stopped buying pricey cups of coffee. Working for a digital marketing company at the time, he started driving for Uber and bagging groceries for Instacart. He says it was “a blow to the ego” whenever a passenger turned out to be someone he knew, but he stayed focused. And he signed up with Airbnb to rent out his apartment on weekends. When guests rented his place, he would take off for Atlantic City and drive for Uber, sleeping overnight in his car in a parking lot near the shore. “I’d watch the sun rise in the morning,” he says. “That would kind of invigorate me.”
Within about a year and a half, he had managed to raise $30,000. In the spring of 2015, he opened his mailbox store in the Fishtown neighborhood, a hipster zone that got its name from its history as a center for commercial shad fishing in Philadelphia.
But before long, it seemed it might all fall apart.
At a doctor checkup in 2017, he learned he had a tumor on his pancreas. “My heart dropped,” he says. A Google search of pancreatic tumors left him fearing the worst. “I’m on my knees, praying every single day. I told myself, OK, well, let me just do this thing,” he says of launching his shop. “I just really felt like this is what I was born to do. I remember making a promise to myself and making a promise to God: Just let this be my legacy. If I’m not going to make it longer than 10 years, just give me 10 years to make this the best that it could be, so at least they can remember me for this.”
About two months later, he had the tumor removed, and then learned the life-changing news: It was benign.
“So I go from seeing my whole life in front of me to just, you know, milk and honey,” he says. “That was just an incredible wave of emotions that came over me.” After a few weeks in recuperation from the surgery, he was back in the shop, with his parents, friends and longtime girlfriend, Maria Gomez, coming in to help him out. He smiles as he recalls, “Customers were like, ‘You need to take a vacation.’ I’m thinking that my whole life is a vacation, because I thought I wasn’t going to be here anymore.”
Today, he says, “Trust me, I’ve never worked harder in my life, but when I tell you that I really enjoy what it is that I do, and I feel truly grateful that I have an opportunity to move my body, move these packages. . . . I’m playing with the house money now.”
* * *
As his business grew, he moved across town to the space in Queen Village and launched his YouTube channel, FishboxTV. He now has more than 2,800 subscribers to the channel, where he describes daily doings in the shop and gives advice on launching and running a mailbox store. As usual, he keeps it personal. Sometimes his 5-year-old son, Nolan, who likes to hand boxes to customers, makes an appearance.
“The YouTube channel has been so great,” he says. “There have always been mailbox stores, but I would go as far as saying I was one of the first — if not the first — people within this industry to post daily content, weekly content. There are probably about five to 10 people that do this now, and many of them have reached out to me and said very kind things. But in some ways, I guess I could say I have been a pioneer in the space from the content perspective, putting everything on the internet and showing day-to-day life and being open and honest and authentic about stuff.”
One person who tuned in and reached out for advice: Allan Sexius in Cincinnati. Suarez remembers that phone call well: “When he was telling me his story, I thought, man, this guy reminds me a lot of me when I was younger, the job that he had, the story that he had, the struggles that he had. And so I said, ‘Hey man, if you’re really serious about doing this, why don’t you come work in the Fishbox store for a couple days, and I’ll show you what we do all day?’”
Sexius got on a plane. Suarez, who was moving into a new apartment at the time, let him stay in the place he had just left, as his lease wasn’t up yet. He took him out to dinner and showed him the ropes at the shop. Suarez says he remembered the opportunities he had been given throughout his life, including at Notre Dame, “because people saw something in me,” and he wanted to give back.
Sexius appreciated the helping hand. “I was actually in the process of opening my own store, and I came across his YouTube page, and then I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a brother that’s doing the same thing,’” he says. “So yeah, I just took that as a sign; let me reach out and get as much knowledge as I can from him. Honestly, it was like an instant connection. He was just like a big brother, for real.”
Suarez now gives consultations as part of his business, even though he’s helping people launch mailbox stores that could compete with his own. “That’s the Notre Dame way,” he says, noting that two friends from Keenan Hall have helped him throughout the years as well, designing software that does nifty things like sending people email alerts with pictures of their packages when they arrive at the shop. He has big ambitions for his business, hoping to expand around the city and eventually across the country.
* * *
“Hey, what’s up, Patrick?” Another customer has popped into the shop.
“How’s it going?”
“I’m good man,” Suarez says. “How you doing today, my friend?”
“I’m chilling.”
It turns out that this customer, Patrick Bransfield, has a very interesting story to tell about his introduction to Fishbox.
He says he was walking past the store a couple years ago, grocery bags in hand, when a mugger smacked him on the back of the head, “first with a shoe and then with a fist,” Bransfield says. “It was just random.”
Suarez saw it unfolding through his shop window. “I saw somebody getting assaulted by somebody else out there. He had dropped everything, and this guy’s just kind of whaling on him,” he recalls. “That was the craziest thing.” Suarez and a customer rushed outside to stop the attacker. “We wrestled him down to the ground,” Suarez says. “It was a team effort.”
“Yeah, they literally tackled him,” Bransfield says. “This athlete named Napoleon ran into battle without flinching.”
“Yeah, that was crazy, man,” Suarez says. “Thank God, it didn’t get worse than it was.”
The men called the local police precinct and then 911, and in the meantime the mugger scurried away. But Suarez had a new customer.
“I became a customer literally the following week,” Bransfield says.
Abby Pesta is an award-winning journalist and author of The Girls, which Library Journal in 2019 called perhaps ‘the most important sports title of the year,’ and co-author of How Dare the Sun Rise — a ‘gut-wrenching, poetic memoir,’ according to The New York Times. Learn more at AbigailPesta.com.