Let's talk about soda and electricity
Welcome to "nouveau monde", a four-handed newsletter to better understand how to make the world better through the lens of retail. This is #49.
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Le menu du jour at nouveau monde is about a startup and Amazon.
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Today's newsletter is 734 words, a 4-minutes read.
Tired of plastic water bottles? Help Thomas to help you.
by Phil
I saw “Jerry Maguire” again yesterday. You know… When a sports agent has a moral epiphany and is fired for expressing it, he decides to put his new philosophy to the test as an independent agent with the only athlete who stays with him and his former colleague. There is this very funny moment. “Help me to help you”.
Thomas needs money not because he wants money.
Wait… Who is Thomas?
We met in San Francisco back in January 2016. Good soul, good energy, a nice catch, part of the Frenchies interested to meet me while I was sitting in San Francisco. Thomas Agarate is entrepreneur. In his 30s now. His personal website is telling more about him, but not about what he’s doing now.
AWA. “Changing the way people consume soda”. Making it easy and fashionable to make drinks at home, with a beautiful appliance with recurring sales on accessories and flavors.
He already has created a startup, a product, a crowdfunding campaign. But if you know well the startup ecosystem, you’re aware that any entrepreneur always question his vision, needs support, and need friends, mentors, business angels to make their path free of the little things that stop them to move forward.
Thomas has no doubts. He has sold many soda machines, and knows what’s next, listening to his existing customers to make the products as perfect as possible. He needs now a little financial push after having bootstrapped the company to achieve the final changes in design. You have 7 days to support his new campaign.
She’s Electric
by Anthony
Amazon announced on Monday that it plans to invest 1 Billion Euros in electric vehicles and low emission infrastructure in Europe, pursuing its plan to be net carbon neutral by 2040.
The press release gives us a few numbers about where the company is nowadays and some of its plans. We learn that they have 3,000 electric vehicles today enabling them to deliver more than 100 million packages in 2021.
They plan to reach 10,000 vehicles by 2025, including more than 1,500 heavy goods trucks, designed for the middle-mile shipments, moving packages from a hub to another.
One major challenge to achieve that goal might be the availability to simply purchase the vehicles as production is not that easy with the lack of components a lot of companies are facing. Another « stone in the shoe » for Amazon is that it had announced a few month ago that it would buy 100,000 vans from Rivian, which is facing a major crisis as it has just announced a major recall of 13,000 vehicles, leading to a big share slump.
Easy to make big announcements but the execution will make Amazon face challenges. I’m not too worried for Amazon, though…
Amazon’s new investment doesn’t only deal with vehicles. Their plan also is to double their micromobility hub footprint in Europe.
For the moment, they have about 20 of these hubs, located near city centers and that have multiple advantages :
they permit to get products delivered faster by bringing best sellers near to the customer. They also allow to fulfill the hub outside of peak hours, reducing the time spent in traffic, pollution… And, regarding CO2 emissions, they enable low carbon deliveries by foot or bike for instance.
All hubs are not the same but we know that one of these in the UK is made to deliver 5M packages a year, so we’re not talking small numbers.
A few days ago, Amazon declared that it will shut down its small delivery robot called Scout. The company is "reorienting the program" after certain aspects failed to meet customer needs, according to a spokesperson. Amazon started its program early 2019 and it was supported by 400 employees worldwide. Scout won't solve the last-mile carbon emissions problem and Amazon goes back to manned solutions for its last mile deliveries.
Bonus track by Anthony
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