It was 6:08 a.m. on a recent Saturday in Brooklyn Heights, and because of the roulette wheel that is traffic on the Long Island Expressway, Dipendra Rawal needed to hit the road.
Mr. Rawal, 40, is an Uber-driver-turned-operations-director at Tote Taxi, a delivery service that has been running between New York City and the Hamptons since 2018. And on this drizzly morning, it was his job to ferry four boxes of buttery croissants to East Hampton, N.Y., where the Brooklyn-based bakery L’Appartement 4F was set to open a pop-up store at 10 a.m.
Nearly three hours later, a polo-clad Mr. Rawal pulled into the parking lot of the Maidstone, a boutique hotel in East Hampton. “Usually, delivery is not so glamorous,” said Ashley Coiffard, an owner of L’Appartement 4F, as scores of pastries emerged from the 2024 Acura MDX.
The $500 mission was complete. Such regular hauls amount to six-figure annual sales, according to Danielle Candela, the Tote Taxi founder.
Ms. Candela, 35, grew up in East Quogue, N.Y. — “not quite the Hamptons” — and conceived of Tote Taxi in 2017 while living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
“I was always schlepping my stuff,” she said, between her apartment and her family on Long Island. “I felt like a bag lady all the time, carrying my suitcase on the subway and running for the Jitney or the Long Island Railroad.”
In November of that year, Ms. Candela, who was working in sales at the wedding website The Knot, entered a business competition in Southampton and pitched a delivery service. She won $15,000. Aided by an additional $5,000 from her late father, who had owned a landscaping business, she purchased a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van to open for business the next spring.
At that point, Ms. Candela had not seen a courier service dedicated to delivering the essentials to the 1 percent of the East End — Wellbutrin, dog medicine, putters, a dress or keys. Instead, if Upper East Siders in Sagaponack needed their tennis racket pronto, it might have found its way onto a Hampton Jitney bus or the back seat of a chauffeured car.
Where New Yorkers with second homes saw headaches, Ms. Candela recognized opportunity. “Sometimes, people have been blown away, like, ‘This is genius,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘Is it?’ I don’t know. We’re just picking stuff up and dropping it off.”
Today, she employs three full-time drivers and more as contractors; the company owns two Sprinter vans. Ms. Candela declined to reveal some of her clients, citing privacy concerns, but said some high-wattage celebrities used the service. Last year, she made one delivery that involved interacting with the Secret Service, “which was intense,” she said. In the back of the car? A piece of art.
By 9:37 a.m. on the day of the croissant delivery, Cecil McGlynn, 17, had begun his paper route from Tote Taxi’s office in Southampton. Lugging a dolly loaded with Cultured, an arts magazine based in New York and Los Angeles that uses the taxi service for East End distribution, the high schooler gently placed a fistful of copies on the doorsteps of East Hampton stores like Book Hampton and Harper’s Gallery. Mr. McGlynn also does local deliveries of crudités.
Beyond pastries and publications, Tote Taxi will deliver just about anything that’s legal — for the right price. In most cases, a same-day Manhattan-to-Montauk delivery costs $350; less if the items can wait, more if there’s a rush.
But Ms. Candela has drawn a line at one request: nannies. “It’s a work truck,” she said.
These days, most business revolves around $895 “summer relocations,” which the company labels “mini moves,” to rentals and second homes. While families could hire any of the infinite movers that operate out of the tristate area, Ms. Candela’s clients appreciate a more “personalized” service. “We’re more nimble and petite,” she said.
In 2022, the company began servicing Palm Beach, Fla., another stop on the ultrarich circuit, and recently started delivering luggage to sleep-away camps. And now, for $150, they will include a basket of goodies from Red Horse Market in East Hampton, a Martha Stewart favorite.
Ms. Candela is exploring what’s next: shuttling city pets out east, and a possible Boston-to-Cape Cod route. “I want to be a household name,” she said.
When Mr. McGlynn, the teenager, interviewed for his job, Ms. Candela recalled asking him: “What if the challenge is that there’s a pebble driveway and you’re lifting a heavy suitcase. Do you think you can handle that?” He responded by sharing a story about helping his sister carry her suitcase from a car in his driveway.
And that was just the kind of experience that landed him his gig.
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