hero CASE
Warp. Designing and validating a venture in Last Mile logistics.
Anticipating the future of ecommerce in collaboration with a major infrastructure & mobility company.
hero CASE
Warp. Designing and validating a venture in Last Mile logistics.
Anticipating the Future of Ecommerce in collaboration with a major infrastructure & mobility company.
Overview
Joining forces with a target in mind:
Cofound a new venture to conquer this thriving sector
Once Last Mile delivery was identified by our partner as the territory to explore, we were eager to understand the entire universe around it and study a set of different solutions to capture the opportunity. This was the challenge we had ahead of us:
How to optimize the Last Mile distribution process of goods transportation through tech, data and innovative business models?
With that mindset, we started to work together according to the process below:
Set-up
Challenge
Delimiting the challenge to set the project expectations.
INSIGHTS
Discovery
From day one to discovering the industry’s flaws.
Labs
Validation
From identified problems to validated business models.
SET – UP
The context in a few words
We don’t want to lecture you, however we would like to help you understand this case better by sharing our definition of Last Mile:
The concept refers to the step in the logistics process of transporting people and goods that involves covering the last stage of a delivery or a transit, where normally a high quantity of short trips are made and efficiency is harder to achieve.
In this line, Last Mile optimization refers to the changes in the supply chain that companies and their transportation partners are developing to assess the boom of ecommerce and demand for omnichannel retail.
Stepping into the discovery
From a challenge to 2 identified business opportunities
Our Discovery is divided into three phases: Market, Problem and Solution Discovery. In each one we set a different breakdown of learning goals and tools to extract insights and define solutions.
Market Discovery
One of the things our team loves the most is to dive into new markets and extract key insights that allow us to define the territories into which we then later seek for the problems to solve. Meanwhile, these were our main findings:
Reverse logistics is hugely important
Problem Discovery
This phase started with the definition of 4 territories to look into: Logistics, Business Models, Cities and Customer Experience. Around them we set ourselves different learning goals that were tackled with specific tools. Below we tell you more about the top 3 problems we encountered.
Free shipping is just a perverse marketing tool.
Convenience comes first for the great majority, while environmental impact is still secondary.
Industry has high labor costs, slow technology adoption and scarce collaboration between players.
Solution Discovery
We held a co-creative ideation session using brainswarming to ideate around the main problems identified earlier on.
Divergence
41 ideas
Development
7 ideas
Convergence
2 ideas
Divergence
41 ideas
Development
7 ideas
Convergence
2 ideas
idea 1
Urban Hubs
Also known as ‘dark stores’ or ‘quick commerce’. Operating a network of strategically located spaces to make a more efficient delivery of e-commerce goods.
idea 2
Curbside Management
Optimizing the in & out of parking zones by digitalising curbside areas in key congested locations with a public concession based business model.
Choosing concepts
We did an internal pitch deck competition of both the Curbside Management and Urban Hubs opportunities. The process was backed up by utilizing the Byld Metric, which is made up of over 40 parameters converging around 6 areas. We had to choose one, and we went for Urban Hubs, mainly because our team had great expertise in logistics and Ecommerce and because the timing felt just right.
The Byld Metric is a tool we have developed over the years that allows us to be able to compare different opportunities with different lenses: from a corporate venture building, investor and entrepreneur perspective. It is made of more than 50 parameters divided into 5 dimensions that contains both cuantitative and cualitative criteria.
an exciting validation
2 months of really going into the details of Urban Hubs
Here is where our validation loops come into place. We call them loops because it is a continuous process of iterating and learning that allows us to minimize the risks when launching a new business.
Loop 1
Once we decided that our solution was to going to be focused on ‘hubs’ we brainswarmed together yet again. Having already identified some key areas to work around (Value Prop, Op Model, Clients/BM and Key Partners), the session’s objective was to define a set of learning goals to investigate and experiments to be tested to validate those learning goals. After all this was digested, we prioritized 4 learning goals to face Loop1:
Real Estate analysis
Covering the 80% of the demand with 3, 4 and 5 hubs:
Loop 2
Our objective was to strengthen the value proposition of starting an Urban Fulfillment business in Madrid by testing the demand, get solid data behind the analysis, identify exactly where it could start and how and go the extra (and last) mile by conducting a small pilot.
Outcome & Deliverables
Meet Warp
Warp operates a network of urban warehouses to bring e-commerce inventory closer to final customers. Warp offers end-to-end fulfillment solutions that unlock same-day delivery to e-commerce shops. Our customers can externalize 100% of their logistics with us: their stock is stored inside our urban warehouses and when an order is placed, we deliver it to the end customer.
We gave it a visual identity
Warp provides seamless, fast, and reliable, turnkey logistics solutions to create better cities thanks to the power of data and we needed to comunicate that not only with words but also with what the user sees.
Warp does not end here, we will keep you updated ✨
Discover our territories
