The idea of PickItEasy came from one of my first working experiences in a company. I was living alone, and I was feeling that, most of the time, I was forced to eat outside in the night, unless I had done my groceries shopping in advance. I shared this reflection with a friend of mine, working at the same time in a financial company in Paris, and he realized that most of his colleagues were facing the same issue. On top of this, a majority of these colleagues had children, and a wife with a similar working schedule. In the end, it was impossible for them to buy groceries during the weekdays. Then, they needed to plan their needs for the week and go to the supermarket during the weekends, when they had free time.
This is at this point that came up the idea of PickItEasy: a solution of delivery of groceries, at a low cost, in one of the most convenient places.
My experience of living in Taiwan also taught me something: when a solution is convenient to everyone, it will be used often, for relatively small products quantities. Indeed, the convenient stores (7Eleven, Family Mart, …) are everywhere, and they are always full of people buying few products. In France, for legal reasons that will be explained later on, the implementation of such convenient stores is not possible. This is why, we tried to design a way of being convenient for the people in France who need it the most, in a way that is different from what is done in Taiwan.
1.2. Mission and vision
The mission of PickItEasy is to facilitate the life of the workers, who have schedules which don’t allow them to buy their groceries as they would like to do it. Our mission is then to help them combining their work with a normal way of living and eating. We also aim to provide an alternative solution to the ones existing today, which are not convenient to most of the people.
This is why, it is our mission to provide the workers with a solution fitting their needs, and that will help them to lower the time pressure they face on a daily basis.
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國立 政 治 大 學
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Our vision is to become the service used by all the main companies in France, in order to help their workers optimizing the time they have. The vision of PickItEasy is not only to be the first company to develop this service, but also to always remain the first one coming in the customers’
minds. We aim to be growing fast, in order to offer the service in all the big French cities, and in other European big cities in the future, where we will consider that there is also a need for such service.
1.3. Company name and logo
For the name of the company, we chose “PickItEasy”. With this name, we want to have an easy and quick way of naming the service for the customers. The term of “picking” refers to the fact that the customers, ordering on our platform, only need to take the products ordered when leaving work, to “pick” them. The idea behind adding the term “easy”, is because we want to print in the mind of our customers that, in order to receive their food at their work, they don’t need to make much effort, it is easy, and fast to order through our platform, and to pick the order. Finally, concerning the fact that the name of our company is in English, it is actually because it has more impact in the customers’ minds in France today. An English name is often a synonym of something new and designed to satisfy the customers. This is why, most of the start-ups offering an innovative service in France, have a brand name in English. Also, we don’t have much risk that some customers will not understand the name, because we are targeting companies where the workers have a relatively high education level.
For the logo of PickItEasy, we chose something simple, but that shows what we are offering.
This is why we have created a logo of a shopping basket, in which we have integrated the images of various products. The objective is to show to the customers that, with PickItEasy, they can shop as if they were physically in their convenient supermarket.
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國立 政 治 大 學
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l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
We have designed two different logos, with three different colors. The second line is a representation of our main logo, that we will use as often as possible (when the background is white). The first line has been created in order to have a logo that can fit a light background (that is not white). And finally, the last line is the color we can use for every support where the background is dark, or when the background color doesn’t fit with the black.
Our main logo is on the first column (on the left side), but an alternative logo could be used in the cases where we want to emphasize the name of the brand (second column).
1.4. Founders and former team
The former team of PickItEasy will be composed by four people. Two of us will be the Co-Founders of the company. The assignment of the responsibilities will be done as follows:
General Manager (and Co-Founder): Me, I will be managing and assigning the tasks to all the employees, when the company will grow. I will also manage the operations of the company.
Thanks to my Master specialization in “Operation Management & Supply Chain”, I have a good understanding of how the operations should be managed in a company. I will accompany the
Figure 1 – Different versions of the logo
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launch of the operations in the beginning, by spending the days doing the shopping and the delivery of the orders in all the companies with the employee that we will recruit, in order for him to understand what is needed to be done, and to be able to do this job alone after few months of training.
Head of Partnerships (and Co-Founder): I already know this person because we have been to university together during our Bachelor. He decided to specialize in the “International Business Negotiation” for his Master. We thought about the idea of PickItEasy for the first time together, after we had been working in companies during our internships, and observed the needs of other employees, and even sometimes our own need for this kind of service. The title of “Head of Partnerships” has been selected because he will be the responsible for finding the partner companies to which we will be delivering the products ordered by their employees.
But he will also have as an objective to find sourcing partners, in order to have the lowest cost possible, and to enable us to provide as many products as possible. Finally, as Co-Founders, we will both be responsible for the organization of the future developments of the company. This aspect will be explained and developed later in this business plan.
IT Manager: He is a person I know very well because we come from the same town and we have always been friends. I contacted him few months ago to tell him about my project and since then, he has been sending me some prototypes of website and advises concerning the e-commerce platform selection. He has a Master’s in Computer Engineering, Big Data &
Connected Devices. He is currently developing his own company project on data protection, but he will be fully available to work with us when PickItEasy will start developing.
Products Purchaser & Deliverer: We will have an employee working from 12pm to 8pm, from Monday to Friday. He will have one hour of break per day, from 3pm to 4pm (between purchase and delivery of the products). This employee will need to have the license to drive trucks. He will pick every day the list of products to be purchased, and then, go to our supplier to buy the products. After this, he will come back to the office in order to sort the products according to the customers’ orders. The load of the truck will then be organized efficiently before delivery, and he will deliver one by one our partner companies. This job being very
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國立 政 治 大 學
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exhaustive, as explained earlier, in the beginning, and when we will receive many orders, I will come with this employee to do these tasks with him. When the company will grow, and when the number of companies delivered will be higher, another full-time employee will be recruited, in order to deliver the orders quicker.