Whoppah heeft dit gerepost
Co-founder & CEO, Whoppah, largest European interior marketplace, ex banker, Founder of Pritle sold to SaxoBank
On 21 May 2019 Evelien Bunnik-Remmelts and I launched secondhand interior marketplace Whoppah. As a marketplace we connect our users to logistics service providers in the checkout. We started working with a few dedicated freelancers and did pickup and deliveries ourselves. To optimise route efficiency we split up orders into two or three routes and used our living room 😅 and our garage as the transshipment centre to organise the items per area. As the order volume grew we started using the garage of our neighbours and eventually rented a 200m transshipment centre near Schiphol Airport. We thought we could use some space for a photo studio 📸 to take items into consigment expanding our services offering. But the growth strongly continued so we opened a 2,300m warehouse in the centrally located city Utrecht where we did transshipments and hosted items for sale in consignment in our showroom. Until then, our team worked from our living room. Since we opened our warehouse in Utrecht we made that our office. Not much later though, our team outgrew the warehouse office so we started sharing the office with our neighbours Crisp in Utrecht where 5 offices were still available. We also opened a warehouse in Venlo of 3.100m to facilitate transshipments optimising routes with smart technologies and operations across the south of The Netherlands 🇳🇱 Belgium 🇧🇪 and Germany 🇩🇪. Our logistics team of 46 outgrew our HQ team of 40. But Covid and the war in the Ukraine drove up salaries in the logistics industry and increased fuel costs. At the same time we were managing a time consuming operation which economies of scale did not improve quickly enough while striving for profitability. In spite of the major benefits of tens of Whoppah branded trucks on the road and lots of physical client interaction we decided to outsource logistics 100% and stopped taking items into consigment late 2023. What a ride it was. Many of the couriers started for themselves and continue to drive in Whoppah trucks for us and other clients of them. Based on our experience we established service level agreements with a wide array of sizeable logistics partners in various countries and have been able to lower shipping costs for our clients and improve our P&L while preserving high quality logistics services across Europe. A challenging practice given that 95% of items being picked up from seller’s homes aren’t packaged. It requires super skills. In the meantime our warehouses are taken over by new tenants and the former logistics colleagues found new jobs and half of our HQ team lives in Amsterdam, so we decided to open an office in Amsterdam! ScaleHub Offices here we come! From where we continue to scale online as the largest secondhand interior marketplace in Europe. Can’t wait for what 2025 has in store. Wishing you all happy holidays ahead and a fabulous entrepreneurial 2025! 🎄🎇💪📈🥂🌍 Refresh your perspective via www.whoppah.com.
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