Surviving the Black Friday eCommerce frenzy
How we supported Relay to hit their growth targets during Black Friday
10x
70%
In November 2023, our portfolio company Relay Technologies, an e-commerce native logistics network, faced the challenge of scaling operations in a short period of time to deliver a peak volume of parcels per day. This period was critical in demonstrating to its corporate customers, such as JD Sports, that the seed-stage company could handle this growth without compromising on delivery quality, such as on-time delivery.
Just before Black Friday, the key period in e-commerce, one of Relay's biggest challenges was having enough last-mile couriers on the road. At the time, the Courier Growth team, which was responsible for ensuring the right size and composition of the last-mile fleet, lacked a team leader to oversee the whole effort. After the Black Friday period, and having demonstrated that rapid volume growth was achievable, the next immediate challenge was to focus on efficiency and drastically reduce the cost per parcel in a short period of time.
1) “Peak” - The Black Friday Period
To fill the void and ensure that Relay was able to triple its volume, a member of the venture development team from Project A joined the Relay team as Head of Courier Growth, spearheading all things last-mile courier growth.
The approach encompassed the following jointly with the team:
- Focusing and managing the team with setting clear targets and daily tracking
- Identifying growth opportunities & solving major blocker for the courier experience
- Setting up and executing new processes & CRM sheets in order to steer the courier outreach in a structured manner
- Dissecting the courier growth funnel in specific funnel steps with clear responsibilities and conversion rate targets
- Enabling better planning of courier supply based on introducing shift pre-booking for the whole peak period, courier bonus quests, improved comms in order to incentivise shift update and increased pay
2) Efficiency - Cost per parcel & preparing for more growth
Immediately after closing the Peak period the company focus shifted to efficiency and reducing our cost-per-parcel. For the courier growth team this meant increasing moped delivered parcels from 1% to 70% within 4 months, reducing operational costs and becoming more efficient throughout. All this while preparing for a 10X growth in parcels volume planned until June.
The approach encompassed the following jointly with the team:
- Increasing the moped fleet share with setting up a cross-functional project team incl. data, tech, warehouses, pitstops, shift building and courier experience researcher
- Testing hyper-local courier acquisition methods for mopeds
- Setting up a growth plan incl. resource needs and org-plan ensuring we manage the planned 10X growth
- Defining and executing on measures to increase CRV throughout newly defined funnel from courier Acquisition > Onboarding > Activation > Graduation > Retention
- Working closely with data and tech in order to gain transparency on key improvement levers, set up dashboards and automate courier communications
- Implementing several measures in order to increase our operational efficiency and effectiveness
- Onboarding new vehicle type e-bikes complementing the moped fleet and thereby contributing to achieving the cost-per-parcel volume
Black Friday was one of the most important tests of Relay's business. Project A helped us to pass it to and set the path for future growth.
(1) Finally we were able to handle the growth with a huge, cross-functional team effort including mainly the data, tech, pitstop, live ops and sales team. After the Black Friday period the support was continued until end March focusing on efficiency and laying the groundwork for the 10X growth ahead.
(2) The team scaled the moped delivered parcels successfully to approx. 60% within 3 months, well on target to achieve 70% by the end of the OKR period. In addition the courier growth team was well set-up with 3 new team members joining in order to enable the future growth.
Want to learn more? Contact us at magdalena.maier@project-a.com.
Magdalena Maier
