For businesses, launching new product features or new company initiatives can often be a hit and miss — and mostly the latter rather than the former. If executed wrongly, they could be costly or even deadly for companies.
Recently though, we’ve seen the rise of a school of thought that most of us are familiar with: the lean startup methodology. This favours experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. While the methodology is just a few years old, its concepts — such as “minimum viable product” and “pivoting” — have quickly taken root in the startup world, and closer to home, we have seen almost everyone adopting this.
One such company is RedMart, and they are working on a secret experiment.
When a photo of RedMart’s new locker service at Google Singapore’s office surfaced on social media, we couldn’t help but get in touch with the team to find out more.
According to Mitch Krogman, who is in charge of RedMart’s new Click and Collect (online to offline, or O2O) efforts, the new locker is but one of RedMart’s many experiments. Such experiments are constantly being conducted by the team to learn what customers find most useful.
“We implemented the lockers at Google to make delivery more convenient to our customers, in this case Googlers. It also happens to bring down delivery costs by consolidating all the deliveries in one place. For our O2O effort, location is one of the biggest things we are testing, and we are starting with Google Singapore, which is quite central and has a good number of Google employees, or Googlers,” Mitch told Vulcan Post.
One thing to note about RedMart’s lockers is that the team specifically sourced for their own lockers and retrofitted them to include additional features. This decision was made because the team found that existing locker companies charged a very high price for specialised retrofitting, so RedMart is “building our own lockers”.
“RedMart really encourages lean startup, we test and deploy quick ideas and see if they work,” Mitch added.
The locker service is currently available only at Google Singapore’s office, but prior to that, there was a simple one at JFDI’s office, which houses a number of startups as well as frequent visitors. While Mitch did not reveal much about RedMart’s O2O efforts, he mentioned that it is still in its early phase, and teased that they are experimenting with a few other things. If the results for the locker service is satisfying, we expect more of such lockers to pop up around the island.
