Epicery: Bridging the digital divide
Epicery was founded in 2016 by entrepreneurs Elsa Hermal and Edouard Morhange to offer busy Parisian professionals access to small, gourmet food and drink merchants via an easy-to-navigate online portal. The e-commerce pioneer has found a niche in the market and now connects hundreds of artisan merchants and 6,000 consumers across Paris and Lyon, with ambitions to expand across France and beyond.
Walk the narrow streets of Paris and you will find any number of gourmet bakers, butchers, cheese mongers, greengrocers, and wine merchants. These iconic artisans are as representative of Paris as the Eiffel Tower or the Champs Élysées. Yet, like many historic artifacts, these shops are in danger of disappearing. Large supermarket chains, as well as the influx of e-commerce giants and meal delivery services, are squeezing small, independently-owned stores and the producers who supply them.
For young French professionals like Elsa Hermal, artisan food is a way of life worth preserving:
“At Epicery, we're connecting two things: the authenticity, tradition, and savoir-faire from the local artisan to 21st century technology and new customers through an online app,” she says.
Balancing Act
To enable a seamless e-commerce experience, Epicery provides artisans with a tablet loaded with an app that alerts them when an order is received. Once the order is fulfilled, Epicery sends a courier to pick up the order and deliver it to customers within an hour.
The first challenge Elsa and her team encountered was mild resistance from retailers who had no experience with e-commerce or even any online presence. Once artisans agreed to sign up, there was the challenge of how to present the products.
“It took us some time to understand how we could digitise the products online as we need customers to be able to picture the quality…but on the Internet, not in person,” says Hermal.
‘La Chasse’: acquiring customers, empowering employees
As befits a young start-up, Elsa empowered everyone at the company to sign up friends, family, and to think of creative ways to establish and steadily grow a loyal base of customers.
“Customer acquisition is not the responsibility of sales or marketing only. It's the responsibility of each and everyone, including technologists, customer service agents, etc. For example, if the tech team can help make the website faster, it will help improve customer satisfaction and retention.”
To grow its customer base and motivate its 15 employees, Epicery hosts a weekly stand-up meeting called “La Chasse” (the hunt). Attendance is mandatory, though with a table full of cheese, meats, fruit and even wine from Epicery merchants, it is not difficult to entice participants. At each weekly meeting, employees are asked to come up with new ideas for acquiring customers and retaining existing users.
Creating a sense of community
Epicery’s bright and engaging website manages the difficult challenge of communicating the personality and quality of the merchants she curates. Beyond “La Chasse”’, Epicery uses social media to build a sense of community among artisans and the gourmands who cherish their products. The company has an active presence on Facebook and Instagram, in particular, where the posts celebrate food, friendships and community that is increasingly appealing to millennials across cultures and borders.
While still in growth mode, Epicery has posted impressive results with 6,000 loyal customers using the service. Moreover, merchants who sell through Epicery have seen an incremental increase in sales of up to five percent since partnering with Epicery. For merchants like Boucherie Hayée in Paris, Epicery has opened his eyes to the value of e-commerce. “It’s important to keep up-to-date on new technologies so we can communicate with our customers and enable sales over the Internet through a partner like Epicery,” says Patrick Hayée, owner.
Looking to the future – a multichannel vision
Epicery’s business model has attracted attention in France. In fact, the company recently signed an agreement with Monoprix, a French supermarket chain, to deliver on its behalf.
“What we want to build with Monoprix is a platform where people can buy groceries as well as fresh food from local artisans, so customers can get all their groceries delivered in unison. In doing so, we want to keep our city centres alive in the face of aggressive competition from pure digital players.”
To say that Elsa and her team are driven would be an understatement. Epicery established partnerships with the most prestigious chefs and artisans awarded “Meilleurs Ouvriers de France”, launching an artisans food website in Paris so people (re-)discover special French dishes. Epicery is now looking for geographical expansion. After the City of Lyon Elsa has longer-term plans to conquer international markets.
Start-up advice: Elsa
1. Listen to your customers
Always be in communication with your users to understand how you can evolve and improve your offering.
2. Move quickly
Constantly test-and-learn and don’t be afraid to fail.
3. Empower your employees
Give everyone the latitude to build the business regardless of their function and/or job title.
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