Markar Agakanian
Executive Vice President, Quetico
Markar Agakanian is Executive Vice President of Quetico, a logistics, manufacturing, and retail distribution company headquartered in Goodyear, Arizona. He owns company performance and growth strategy and is accountable for keeping daily execution aligned with the business's direction.
Quetico handles receiving, quality control, packing, product verification, e-commerce fulfillment, and branded apparel manufacturing for national retailers and consumer brands. Markar Agakanian oversees 1.1 million square feet of warehouse and office space across seven facilities and a workforce of more than 700 people; his responsibilities range from cross-functional alignment and execution to leadership development and setting the company vision.
He led the development and launch of Quetico's 720,000-square-foot facility in Goodyear, taking the project from ground-up construction through live operations. That meant infrastructure, systems, equipment and operational readiness, then the workflows, staffing models and processes needed to run large-scale customer programs once the doors opened. The site now operates as a combined distribution and order processing, production handling, value added services, e-commerce fulfillment, and Foreign Trade Zone operation.
Under Agakanian, Quetico has moved well beyond traditional warehousing. He took the company's existing operations and scaled them with a focus on efficiency across production, quality control, e-commerce fulfillment, retail compliance, and brand operations. He helped grow quality control and production handling to support throughput of more than 1.5 million units per month, and built out the Foreign Trade Zone capability that now feeds the company's import, export, inventory, and customs duty management solutions. The customer programs managed by his teams run 15 to 18 million units a year, each with its own volume, quality, and retailer requirements.
Much of his work sits where commercial strategy meets the floor. He builds on existing relationships with global brands and national retailers and turns them into operating programs shaped by real capacity, labor, systems, and partnership rather than what a proposal promised. He works alongside his team to lead the operational onboarding of new brands and licenses, and the operational and financial evaluation of acquisitions and other major strategic opportunities, including business turnaround models, distribution footprints, transition plans, and long-term operating economics. He has also pushed standardization, automation, and disciplined reporting across the company, giving leadership real visibility into productivity, labor efficiency, capacity, and financial accuracy.
Agakanian has been full-time at Quetico since 2018, following two summers with the company as an intern and four years at Unico D&M LLC from 2014 to 2018. Since 2024, his focus has widened to include the strategic growth of the company's brand management arm, which holds licenses to national apparel labels and runs them alongside each brand's own leadership.
He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration, earned in 2019, from the College of Business Administration at Loyola Marymount University.
What keeps Markar Agakanian in the business is where it began. His father founded Quetico, and coming to the office with him was his favorite part of growing up. He describes his work today as continuing what his father built, and he doesn't take the distance between sweeping that warehouse floor and setting the company's strategy lightly.
Contact: markar@queticollc.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markar-agakanian-4a958a121/