Thousands of us consumers have expressed support for more sustainable deliveries to change things.
What is the impact of Covid19 on your job?
The impact of this health crisis has been unprecedented for our profession. Even if transport or logistics companies were able to maintain their activities, the very restrictive barrier gestures for many structures required enormous efforts. At the same time, the health crisis has resulted in an increase in parcel flows, particularly BtoC.
Welco is today a facilitator of the logistics chain by positioning itself as an intermediary between a carrier and an e-commerce consumer through our community of available neighbors. As a result, our activity was stopped by our partners. Indeed, adding one more intermediary to handle packages was not respectful of recommended barrier gestures.
On 03/18, our Widgets were temporarily suspended by our partners. At that moment, the question was simple: for 8 weeks we stayed quietly at home to play Paycheck or Monopoly or we racked our brains to adapt. At Welco, we love challenges and hate to endure; we therefore decided to react and implement a frugal adaptation of our initial model (to be discovered later…)
Why this desire to stay positive, to carry out solidarity actions?
This desire to stay positive came very naturally. Welco was founded around healthy, ecological and social values. We are developing a disruptive model with the objective of improving the daily lives of thousands of e-commerce consumers, so being positive is part of our DNA.
On 03/18, when the confinement was announced, we quickly realized that it would last (around 4 weeks to be honest and not 8 (smile..)) and that the time would be long. Thus and naturally, with our young and dynamic team, we decided in 2 sleepless nights and 48 hours of work to create an evolution of our initial tool by temporarily and free of charge transforming our parcel recovery platform between neighbors into a mutual aid platform. solidarity in order to help the most vulnerable.
We launched “I help my neighbor” on 03/19, with the aim of offering people “at risk” to post their needs (shopping delivery, medication, etc.) and for people who are teleworking or partially unemployed to be able to be of service. We were thus able to create more than 500 connections throughout France. “What is really cool about our initiative is that our innovation is basically a solidarity initiative with welkers taking advantage of their availability (often retirees) to collect packages from their neighbors (often proactive people). Well through “I help my neighbor” the roles have been reversed; retirees were able to be helped by dynamic young executives then on partial unemployment or teleworking in relation to the health crisis we were going through.
Finally, we would like to talk about a collective action that we launched just behind in collaboration with the brand “C’est qui le boss”. In order to help local businesses closed during the crisis as well as respond to the frustration of consumers and members (of which I am one) " smile " not to find all the products in mass distribution, we decided to create the initiative of solidarity group deliveries. The goal? Come together to create “mass” orders and have them delivered to a local store. The latter will then receive a pallet and distribute the products to consumers. This trader is also rewarded with remuneration which will allow him to help him in these difficult times. We were thus able to carry out around thirty grouped deliveries until the beginning of July, with 600 consumers delivered across France via a virtuous, more sustainable and more economical system. This is a new concept called “Slow Logistics” launched by our partner SKIPPER GROUPE
What was the impact of this action?
The impact of this action was very beneficial; already for all the people who benefited from it. Around 500 mutual aids throughout France: grocery delivery, school help, medication deliveries, parcel drop-offs and mail posting.
We also had great media coverage around this solidarity action which made noise. Indeed, the initiative was relayed on social networks by many actors from the “I help my neighbor” community who appreciated this action. Indeed, many French people sought, during the crisis, solidarity initiatives like the one carried by Welco in order to be useful and provide a service to the most vulnerable. We were therefore able to relay our action on the France 3 news at the national level for more than a week, after an appearance on RTL and Virgin radio.
This initiative allowed us to maintain activity on our platform even if it was transformed for the duration of the crisis. We were able to continue communicating on social networks and therefore enliven our community. Moreover, this allowed us to increasingly increase our community on Welco and to come into contact with great companies who were interested in our model, but also in our ability to create new opportunities and power, in a near future, adapt our service to very specific markets.
Will your job change thanks to the crisis? If so, how do you envision it?
I don't know if our profession will evolve but what is certain is that there is an awareness on the part of many players in logistics and transport, just like many French people, in our daily lives , whether for the way we consume, move around or even “get delivered”.
As a result, we have met many transport partners with whom we are preparing great projects who want even more than ever today to highlight ecological and eco-responsible awareness for their delivery circuit.
The health crisis has made it possible to see agile companies and those which were not advanced in their digital transformation. Our profession will indeed evolve and push logistics to continue its transformation, digital of course but also ecological.
In terms of evolution thanks to the crisis there is also human contact. Unfortunately, we had to wait for an unprecedented crisis for service to be put back at the center of concerns for certain professions such as logistics. Many have already understood that customer service is changing; consumers today will accept to have their e-commerce packages delivered in 5 days but be sure to collect it on the indicated day and from a trusted neighbor rather than having a promise of delivery in 24 hours and running a week later his package.
The crisis has caused an explosion in e-commerce orders and therefore parcel delivery; 1 billion packages were to be delivered in 2020, it will be 1.3 billion according to some estimates by the end of this year. As a result, many logistics circuits will be saturated, so it will be necessary to find alternatives to current delivery via more virtuous, more responsible and more sustainable systems.
In terms of this evolution, we plan to continue to develop Welco via our collaborative and virtuous system. 4 years ago when we imagined Welco, we would never have imagined that such a crisis would change consumption habits so quickly.
Finally, the reliable addresses of our welkers as well as quality service are our assets.
“Today we call our welkers one by one, they know us, appreciate us, we take the time to discuss because our human values are sincere. We are a field solution and we are provincial entrepreneurs. Who better than Welco can talk about proximity?
To know more : www.welco.io/
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