Posts Tagged ‘delivery’

What we are learning from The Dabbawala – Fast lunch delivery in Mumbai

February 18th, 2010
Lately, I’ve been studying the management system of the Dabbawala, a 125 year old lunch delivery service in Mumbai, India.
It has a network of 5000 Dabbawala who deliver lunch boxes (tiffins) across the entire city.
Some takeaways:
  • Simple value proposition: a homemade lunch amongst a sea of fast food
  • Six Sigma certification despite low technology (they had no website and did not use SMS until recently)
  • Flat management works best: They have a 3 tier hierarchy including executives, Dabbawala managers, and Dabbawalas
  • Core beliefs of hard work, pride, and entrepreneurial ownership of the business exist at all levels
  • 99.99% accuracy of food deliveries
  • The business enjoys a 5-10% yearly growth rate
A great recap of numbers and pictures of the Dabbawalas on SlideShare:
For the past few weeks, HeroEx has been streamlining its business. We have been working on this:
  • Keeping overhead as low as possible
  • Limited product offering (just the most popular items) for standard deliveries; we are still continuing custom orders for a premium price
  • Recruiting more Delivery Heroes and Delivery Managers
  • New set of guiding principles for Delivery Heroes and Delivery Managers
  • Redesigned website: cleaner with a focus on products, Heroes, and building community
  • Improving our internal management systems
  • Maintaining our 100% accuracy and timeliness (1 hour) on deliveries
Thanks for your support!
Marissa
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Durex on HeroEx – Sounds of the Season

December 30th, 2009

from Adrants

Anybody else tired of Christmas songs? They sound like the Winter Blues by now.

So our friends at Adrants helped us get back in the mood – with a Durex commercial. Just in time for New Year’s Eve. The video portion is safe for watching at work, but the audio portion should be called “Siren Night”. Remember, one of our bestsellers is – yes, indeed – 48 count condoms. Delivered in under 1 hour.

‘Cause fast is the only way we know how to roll.

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Hot Lil Somethings

December 28th, 2009

Xmas is over. Time to refocus on you. Let the hotness begin. Self-indulgence++

We’re serving up all this hotness in 1 hour. Just click on the pretty pics to get em.

1. kidrobot’s Smorkin’ Labbit in Bronze

Ooh, a bad little rabbit. Smorkin’ Labbit.

2. kidrobot’s Smorkin’ Labbit in Silver

So okay, we love Smorkin’ Labbit in Bronze so much that we had to feature it in Silver too. Since there’s no Platinum.

3. kidrobot’s Smorkin’ Labbit in White

Okay okay, we saved the best Smorkin’ Labbit for last. The white one. Follow the White Labbit and get it here.


4. Moleskine Plain Notebook – Pocket Size

Mmm buttery. It’s just whispering for you to write secret notes in it. Or poetry that floats across its pages.

5. Breaking Dawn (Hardback)

Hardback is just a better experience than paperback. Read it before the movie version is tragically spliced into 2 movies.

Are we missing your fave item? Is it too hot to handle? Want us to carry it? Comment below and let us know.

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We’ll Return your Christmas Gifts in 1 Hour or Less

December 25th, 2009
A photo of a bear decoration for a Christmas tree.

For some of us, Christmas consisted of kissing under the mistletoe, drinking spiked eggnog, and getting presents which would probably sit around and collect dust.

Did Santa give you something you didn’t want for Christmas? Even if you were a bad kid this year and deserved the bad present:

HeroEx will help you return it if you have the gift receipt.

Through January 5th 2010, we will help you return your Christmas gifts if you’ve kept the gift receipt, and if the store gives cashback on returns. Or if the store has an exchange-only policy and you know what you’d like to exchange your gift for, we can handle that too. We will make sure to reconcile the difference between the price of the old item and the new item.

We’re doing gift returns for just $12 – that’s the same price as our 1 hour custom deliveries.

All you need to do is order as if you were requesting a custom delivery, and make sure to tell us if you have your gift receipt – just go here.

(Our PR goddess, Marivic Valencia, gave her 4 year old daughter a Husky puppy for Christmas - this is one of the few Christmas gifts we can't return :) )

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HeroEx is here!

December 24th, 2009

BOOM, here it is. The alpha version of HeroEx (short for Hero Express), just in time for Christmas.

HeroEx is crowdsourced local express delivery. Think: FedEx meets Amazon Mechanical Turk.

You can buy almost anything you like and we will deliver it in under 1 hour. Right now, delivery prices are $9-12. The first test market we are making this available in is San Francisco.

If you buy things online but hate waiting for days to receive them, you’re going to really like what we have in store. If you think FedEx, UPS, and USPS are way too slow, you’re right – and you shouldn’t have to put up with it.

At HeroEx, you buy items from our storefront at the price you would normally pay, plus a small fee for delivery. We’re able to keep delivery costs low because we source Delivery Heroes from the community, and we have no warehouses. Jack in the Box says, “We don’t make it til you order it,” but HeroEx says, “We don’t buy it til you order it.”

Here’s what some of our friends are saying about HeroEx:

“Weirdly neat idea!” -Philip Kaplan, Founder of Blippy, AdBrite, and Fuckedcompany

“We were just sitting in a meeting and the batteries for our wireless keyboard ran out.  Who can save us?  HeroEx!” -Lawrence Coburn, CEO of RateItAll

Where do you come in? Help us improve our service by making your first order – choose anything you’d like us to deliver, and tell all your friends about your new secret weapon.

Marissa Louie, Founder and CEO of HeroEx

marissa@heroex.com

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