Interview with Jean-Baptiste MAILLANT and Antoine SENTENAC – Co-Founders of the startup Wing
Over the past ten years, we have seen the birth of numerous startups whose ambition is to reclaim the last mile of delivery. It is a market which is beginning to structure itself and will undoubtedly soon consolidate. More recently, new startups have focused on 1er mile.
What is 1er mile (for those of you who are not comfortable with the term: this is the upstream part of last mile logistics.
Three main cases:
- An individual who sells a product on a marketplace, a delivery person picks up the sold product, brings it back to a warehouse, the product is packaged and then shipped via a market carrier.
- An individual has ordered a product which is available in a store, will be collected by a delivery person and then follow the same process as before.
- A small merchant site which does not have its own logistics but is still too small to subcontract its logistics activity. He makes the goods available every day, a deliveryman comes to collect the goods, this goods is packaged and injected into a transport network.
The first operators were born in the United States a few years ago then in France 3 years ago.
Wing is one of these players; the startup today supports the omnichannel strategy of major brands, but not only that!
Interview
SprintProject: Jean-Baptiste, Antoine, what is the story of Wing ?
We launched the company in 2016 with the objective of helping the 250,000 small French e-merchants and helping them structure their e-logistics.
We have developed a process to recover the goods, inject them with a logistician then integrate them into a national transport network. We then raised an initial fund of 2 million euros and one of the investors gave us access to free offices, which allowed us to start developing our business.
One of our investors introduced us to a well-known consultant in the world of logistics and the latter helped us understand the challenges of controlling the process from end to end.
We decided to set up an urban warehouse to manage our own needs and define our processes in detail with the long-term objective of transferring knowledge to logisticians.
In 2017, historic retailers began to contact us to ship from store.
These new entrants have enabled us to accelerate our growth, expand our offering and improve our performance.
SprintProject: And today'today?
Well, we work on a daily basis for around thirty retailers for whom we collect daily in store.
To respond to the growth in volumes, we have developed a warehouse in Saint-Denis. This warehouse is able to manage simple daily flows (reception, packaging, dispatch in transport networks), specific organizations (packaging respecting complex specifications) or one-off operations.
New markets are also opening up. For example, we are working on new processes with Vente-Privée which would make it possible to collect flows of unsold items directly from the brands' stores.
Building on these successes, we have been financially balanced since February 2018 and as a result, we are self-financing our development, which gives us real freedom.
SprintProject: C'what is it'future of Wing?
Our desire is to quickly offer a national offer and then begin European development.
So we are looking for the best solution to extend our model.
We know that the market is with us, that the generalization of omnichannel opens up major opportunities for our business and now that we have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model, all we have to do is deploy...
For more information : https://www.wing.eu/fr
SprintProject: It is pleasant after several great meetings to see to what extent certain startups are structured and visionary. Beyond the idea, they seek to demonstrate the effectiveness of their business model and this is typically the case for Wing. There is no doubt that the subject of the first mile is a subject of the future and I would not be surprised to see large companies in the sector take a close interest in the subject in the months to come...
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