Interview with Jacopo Berlusconi, Co-Founder of Blink, the revolutionary service that changed the way of thinking about shipments
The world where we live today is based on speed, the difference between competitors is the timing with which you can offer a service or a product. This race against time has increased the desire of the customer to receive what he needs as quickly as possible. Many companies have taken advantage of this need, making the speed and reliability of deliveries their strength. We all know the Amazon Prime service that offers deliveries within 24 hours but in Italy, there is a start-up that can do even better. We are talking about Blink that offers a delivery service that allows you to receive your online purchases in less than 2 hours. Buying from the brands with which it collaborates, you will have the advantage of receiving orders at your home in times that we can consider as a record.
How to use Blink
1) Choose the Blink option for the delivery within the day of the order.
2) You can select the desired time slot for delivery.
3) you will receive your purchase on the same-day and in an environmentally friendly way, starting from the type of vehicles used (cargo bicycles, electric scooters) to the reduced packaging. Speed and at the same time environmental sustainability.
4) You can always track your order via smartphone or computer thanks to the service offered by Blink. The delivery time forecast will be continuously updated, and you can change the delivery time and address according to your needs.
If you own an e-commerce website, the same-day delivery will lead you to conquer an increasingly large audience making you stand out compared to competitors, the shopping experience of customers will improve and therefore also the brand awareness and loyalty of customers will. With Blink, in addition, you will respect the environment.
The set of these factors will lead your business to achieve incredible results. If you too want to become part of this new concept of fast deliveries, you just have to find out by reading the interview below.
Hi Jacopo, nice to meet you, and thank you for the time you are dedicating to us. Blink: can you explain it to us in your own words?
With Blink, we offer the sustainable delivery of online orders within 2 hours. We develop a landing page dedicated to the same-day offer of each of our partner brands, integrated with our urban warehouses and our delivery platform. This way, brands can launch the service in a few days without disturbing their IT, and their customers can receive orders in the blink of an eye and sustainably.
How and when the Blink idea was born?
The idea was born among the desks of the Politecnico di Milano, in a logistics course. Using large vans to distribute the small packages of e-commerces in large cities with traffic and no parking didn’t seem like a good idea, so Blink was born.
We soon realized that to compete in this market we could not only propose greater efficiency, but we had to bring value to consumers with a better service, and so we went from looking only at the logistics side to focusing on the impact that a good delivery can have on the brand’s marketing.
How long did it take to shape the project?
We have been working on the project for about two years. The underlying goal is always the same but our solution has evolved a lot as we have better understood the customer needs. The context that surrounds us continues to change, just think about the change in consumer habits with the pandemic, so I would say that the project is constantly evolving.
How is the market responding?
The eCommerce managers with whom we discuss the service have very full schedules, and it is difficult to fit something new in their calendar, especially if it involves logistics. Despite the strong interest, at first it took us a lot of time to close the agreements.
Our goal was to develop a solution that our customers could get extremely excited about, and which allowed for a very fast onboarding. To eliminate the integration time, at the end of last summer we started to propose to the brands to sell with same-day delivery directly through a landing page developed by us and dedicated to them. This way we found much more enthusiasm and significantly reduced the onboarding time.
How has the world of deliveries changed in this pandemic time?
Order volumes are tremendously increasing, and express carriers have made a lot of progress to cope with them, but during peak periods they are struggling. Amazon accustomed consumers to excellent delivery performance, and to live up to expectations you have to do better and better. Players who offer delivery of groceries or ready meals in 10/30/60 minutes are increasingly common. People often work from home, but they are not always available to stop working and pick up their orders. Sensitivity to the working conditions of logistics operators and to the environmental impact of deliveries has also increased significantly.
I believe that the pandemic has accelerated the transformation in this sector and that same-day delivery with crafted digital experience and low environmental impact will become a standard for mid/high-end brands in major European cities, just like it’s already happening in Asia.
How did you launch your project? Have you used crowdfunding campaigns?
We started with Bootstrapping, putting about € 10,000 in total out of our pockets and giving up our salaris. We won public contributions from the city of Milan and the Chamber of Commerce. We rejected the first investment proposals which in our opinion would have taken away too much of the company’s shares compared to the proposed financing.
Last winter we were admitted to YCombinator, the world’s leading startup accelerator, where Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Instacart, and many other amazing startups have started their journey. From YCombinator we received the first investment and a lot of support, then we collected a pre-seed round from international investors
How about future developments?
We are looking for product-market-fit, that is a condition where customers are so excited about our solution that we are not able to keep up with the amount of onboarding requests. At that point, we will know that our solution is good enough to scale, and we will be able to accelerate our expansion in the main European cities.
Credits:
https://www.blinklastmile.com/
