Meeting with Johan Ricaut, Co-Founder of Shopopop, the startup created in 2016 which is revolutionizing home delivery, with an innovative concept: collaborative delivery. Deliveries are made by a community of caring individuals who take advantage of their daily journeys.
Who are you ? And where does your entrepreneurial spirit come from?
I am Johan Ricaut, young entrepreneur from Nantes. I first studied at IDRAC, a business school in Nantes until 2015. Then, I quickly got caught up in the “game” of the entrepreneurial adventure, by participating in a Startup creation competition at only 24 years old.
How was your business born?
I met Antoine Cheul in 2015, through Prashant, one of our former teachers. This meeting allowed us to think about the development of a delivery concept discovered by Antoine, while he was working in India: the delivery of lunch boxes by the Dabbawallahs.
Already at that time, the rise of new models and modes of consumption in Europe, such as carpooling and food e-commerce, consolidated our vision of a collaborative home delivery project.
And it was together that we launched Shopopop the same year.
Who are your clients ? And what need are you meeting?
We have an intermediary role; we connect the right people at the right time, that's Shopopop's core mission.
Shoppers, merchants and customers are brought together in a virtuous circle where each benefits from the other's resources on a daily basis.
For shoppers, it means they can make their journeys more cost-effective, do their bit for the planet by sharing journeys, collect a tip, belong to a community, get out and see people, feel useful, take part in the collaborative economy and contribute to the local economy.
For large food or specialized retailers, collaborative delivery makes it possible to offer customers the choice of another delivery method, to offer them a virtuous service and also to participate in this so-called collaborative economy.
For local merchants, delivering with Shopopop means developing a delivery service without logistical constraints to sell, develop their e-commerce activities and acquire new customers.
Finally, recipients have the opportunity to meet potential neighbors, encourage a more sustainable and collaborative delivery method, while benefiting from a flexible and efficient service.
How can your solution improve the existing Supply Chain?
The supply chain is a complex and dense environment. Collaborative delivery, which we could also call co-transportation, makes it possible to provide a new solution to all the forms and delivery models already existing within the Supply Chain. With Shopopop, we are bringing a new form of consumption based on collaborative economy. We want to offer a delivery experience that:
-
- guarantees local and responsible commerce,
- preserves a social model where people come first via our beautiful community of individual delivery people,
- and preserves the environment as best as possible, by pooling routes already planned to make deliveries.
Where are you today in the development of your company? And what is your action plan?
Shopopop is a French company which today operates in 8 European countries as a leader in this new home delivery model. The company's ambition and project is to strengthen this position by developing partnerships in food and specialized retail environments. Co-transportation will become a new standard in the way consumers can receive their purchases.
What is your opinion on quick commerce and dark stores?
Express delivery experienced a real boom with the Covid crisis and gave birth to zombie businesses: convenience stores and restaurants without customers. Spreading self-service bicycles and scooters in a haphazard way like before them, dark kitchens and then dark stores have flourished in city centers, with the promise of delivering in less than 10 minutes for all needs that cannot wait, from jar of pickles with shower gel.
The emergence of these new services sometimes hides a darker reality for delivery people or for the environment. Not to mention that, under the guise of essential purchases, they are establishing themselves as a standard of lazy consumption where the buyer no longer has to leave their sofa.
If home delivery has become a standard of daily life, the consumer must be aware that no solution is free or neutral, whether from an environmental or social law point of view. When it is not borne by a trader who must give up his independence to survive, the cost weighs on the shoulders of a delivery person who sacrifices his social protection or those of the dynamism of a territory and the quality of the services available for its inhabitants.
THE STARTUP MINUTE
Learn more: https://www.shopopop.com/
