From our earliest days we have been keen as mustard to make Shutl available to shoppers around the world. We’re well aware, however, that we needed to be confident we could walk around the house before we were ready to head out to Kingston in search of Mr Bolt.

With this in mind, to date we have limited Shutl to the confines of London’s M25 while working tirelessly with our courier and retail partners to get the basics of our service right.

502 days on from our first delivery, we feel like we are finally there… and today we’re delighted to announce that Shutl delivery is now available to shoppers in and around Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

If you live, work or play in/around any of these towns and want to give our service a go, you can now find us at Karen Millen, Oasis, Coast and Warehouse.

Over the coming weeks/months we aim to launch across more cities and with additional high street names , so if you’re feeling left out please don’t panic! Instead drop us a comment with the towns & retailers you would like to see offering Shutl and we will do our absolute best not to disappoint.

Last week, the Shutl crew lost one of our first recruits; Rupert Greenhill, who joined us as an intern in July ‘09. Truth be told, at the time there really wasn’t very much of a crew. Although Guy, Steve and I were all working together, none of us were employees and we had no office. Instead we enjoyed the hospitality of Shoreditch House and my living room.

Rupert stood out among applicants for the internship “at a stealth tech startup” that we advertised on Enternships. For starters, he was 28… he possessed a law degree and had spent the previous 3 years enjoying success on a city trading floor. He was basically over-qualified to be doing any of the jobs we were doing, let alone be an intern!  Intrigued, I set up an interview. Rupert explained to us openly that he had been unsatisfied by banking and wanted to find a role where he could develop his business skills whilst ‘making a real contribution to growing a successful and lasting business’. We knew he was right for us immediately and offered him the internship. Fortunately for us, Rupert accepted – despite the fact that we had no funding and so were paying next to nothing.

When we took on our first investment, we offered Rupert a full-time job. He asked if he could invest in the pre-business and so we were delighted to have him as a shareholder too. The following year his £10k came in very useful, buying us another much needed week as we finalised our second investment round.

Rupert’s named role was ‘business development’ which was our way of saying we weren’t creative enough to come up with a title for all the things we needed him for!

He went out and found several of our first clients and worked very closely with Start London, ensuring we were able to make our first delivery. He took bookings for them over the phone when their site was down or they wanted to offer Shutl to an in-store customer. He acted as our in-house legal council and saved us countless gazillions over the years in legal fees for capital raising, IP registering, agreements with our retailers, carriers & consumers. He took on with gusto the role of information / data compliance officer and everything else we threw at him; including regularly taking @Shutldog for walks (particularly when Hendryks was only a few months old and at his most attractive to humans of the opposite sex…).

Rupert was a great ambassador to clients, partners and potential employees. He was also responsible for recruiting our first development intern, the Crawfmeister, who like Rupert also joined our crew full-time.

Feeling tired at the end of last year, shortly after celebrating his 30th birthday, Rupert went to his GP who sent him off for tests. The results were not good. Although he was initially diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a relatively treatable form of cancer, subsequent tests showed him to have a rarer and more malignant form.

Soon after his diagnosis, Rupes came to see me to explain his situation. It was crushing, particularly since he was so healthy and full of life. He put on a very brave face and was matter of fact regarding treatment etc. I could only imagine what must have been racing through his mind. Rupert then asked me something surprising, whether he could continue working ostensibly so that he could maintain a degree of normality in his life. I agreed very quickly. The truth being that I just didn’t know how we could cope without him.

As Rupes’ treatment progressed and his prognosis worsened we saw less and less of him, despite always being at the other end of a phone call/email whenever there was a question that none of us could answer. His and our hope was always that chemotherapy and radiotherapy would weaken the cancer enough that he could undergo a bone marrow transplant. I received an email from Rupert last Sunday letting me know that his latest treatment hadn’t been successful and that he did not have much time left. He wanted me to pass on the news to his colleagues and also to make arrangements for his shares and let me know that there would be a ‘party’.

Alongside the rest of the Shutl team, I feel incredibly privileged to have worked with Rupert over the last two years and fortunate to call him a friend. We only wish that he would be around to see the fruits of his labour and hugely valuable contribution. He is already greatly missed.

Our thoughts and prayers at this difficult time are with Rupert’s parents, his brother & sister and his many, many friends.

Independent retailers are important because they pave the way for the future.  They are the chain stores of the future that fill niches that we never thought needed filling, and now can’t live without!  Hotel Chocolat, The White Company, Specsavers and Wilkinson all started out as independent retailers, and are now a staple on every high street.  Even Clarks, a British Institution that has gone global was once a humble indie store.  In the current economic climate, it is more important than ever to support the stores of the future.  With fashion embracing the home made, ethically sourced, fairly produced and upcycled, independent retailers fit so comfortably with today’s trends and no encouragement should be needed for us to go out and and embrace indie!

A recent report published by Econsultancy compared the attitudes of US and UK consumers towards multichannel shopping and service. Whilst a continually hot topic of discussion amongst retailers, it’s always of interest to drool over some statistics illustrating the evolving shopping habits of the modern consumer, and more importantly the true extent of the current opportunity.

This report is particularly telling. 33.5% of people surveyed felt that purchasing though different channels was very important, with the overwhelming majority (48%) appreciating the choice but not deeming it critical. Only18.5% of shoppers thought that multiple channels were unimportant to their shopping experience. Ultimately, flexibility equals convenience, so it comes as no great surprise to see such demand for multichannel shopping experiences.

When it comes to reserve and collect, however, there is a distinct difference between US and UK consumers. Us Brits are apparently far more likely to reserve items for in-store collection, with a staggering 74% using the service (vs. 43% in the US) – presumably in search of either instant gratification or avoiding costly delivery charges. Higher rates of car ownership, lower fuel costs and the greater distances involved in simply ‘popping out to the shops’ presumably contributes to the fact that reserve and collect is a less compelling option in the US.

Although only 13.3% of shoppers have used their mobile phone to make a purchase, a sure sign of the times is that18.5% use our phones to compare prices whilst we’re out shopping on the high street. A clear indication that brick and mortar retailers have to find new ways of adding value to their shopping experience in order to prevent their offering from becoming commoditized and shoppers being seduced by the pure-plays with the lowest prices..

Whilst a multichannel strategy clearly offers the broadest possible consumer experience, it is also somewhat of a pandora’s box for the retailer; the greater the flexibility offered in purchasing an item, the higher the consumer expectation is in terms of service… particularly when it comes to returns. Over ¾ of customers expect to be able to return an item they bought online to a local store. Whilst this may seem a no-brainer to the shopper, Snow Valley have found that in reality only half of the multichannel retailers they studied actually allow customers to do this. True multichannel integration is clearly still some way off, with many still struggling with the one major sticking point; managing the integration of their online and in-store inventory.

If there’s one conclusion that we can draw from this report, however, it’s that retailing is going in one direction, and fast. Despite the burden placed upon a retailer’s operational processes, a multichannel strategy is critical to remaining a competitive force on the UK high street. Consumer adoption of new technologies and devices means that retailers have to adapt in order to engage with them on their terms – and for those that do it successfully there is a serious bounty to be won.

A huge thanks to BT Expedite and Retail Week for a fantastic awards night. With 500+ attendees representing the leading innovators within retail – and rather a lot of wine – it was a very serious event..
We are honoured that the panel of judges chose Argos and Shutl for the ‘Supply Chain Excellence’! With John Lewis, Sony and the Co-op all in the running, they must have had their work cut out… but we’re thrilled with their decision.

The Retail Week Technology Awards recognise the very best in UK retail innovation. Since launching 15 years ago, the awards have grown to become the biggest and most prestigious event in the industry calendar. They attract the best-known names in the sector, and there is no greater accolade in the retail industry than to win one of the coveted trophies.

So, why did Argos and Shutl win?
Delivery is the single greatest reason that an online shopper drops out of checkout. It is also the single greatest reason that offline shoppers don’t shop online. Shutl solves the delivery problem by enabling online shoppers to select one of two highly compelling delivery options:

1. Immediate delivery within as little as 90 minutes (“Shutl Now”)
2. Convenient delivery within a 1 hour delivery window of their choice (“Shutl Later”)

Both these delivery options are available at a comparable price to standard delivery (from £4.95), and have regularly been offered for free when the customer spends over £50. Customers can also track their orders and watch them “shutling” their way to them in real time on a GPS enabled map.

How has this benefited Argos?

Strategic:
Shutl provides Argos, owner of the most visited UK high street website, with a sustainable competitive advantage over its online and offline competitors. What Argos has excelled at for a decade now is allowing customers to shop across channels in a way that suits them. ‘Check & Reserve’ – Argos’ pioneering online reservation and store collection service – is the Argos sales channel currently experiencing the biggest growth, with a quarter of all Argos customers using the service. Currently utilising the Shutl proposition across all their Greater London stores, Argos has succeeded in offering customers yet another shopping solution.

Shutl enables Argos to leverage their crucial advantage that a pure-play competitor will never have – stock located local to the consumer – to offer a delivery proposition that is compelling enough to aid their ability to attract and retain customers. By keeping delivery distances short, Shutl is able to keep this proposition cost-effective in relation to traditional delivery options. This is also a proposition that would be hard to replicate for a multichannel retailer that does not have a similarly sophisticated stock management system, empowering the customer purchasing decision at an individual store level.

Economic:
• Payment is taken online for Shutl orders, meaning 100% of Shutl reservations result in a sale, which negates the restocking issues Argos experiences when customers do not purchase their stocked in and reserved items.
• Shutl minimises the cost of failed deliveries by enabling the shopper to select the exact time window for their delivery. Along with the real-time tracking – allowing customers to see exactly where the courier is in relation to their delivery address – shoppers can now make sure that they are available to take receipt of their items.
• Shutl orders have seen an increase in AOV versus Argos’ ‘non-Shutl’ Check & Reserve orders over the same period. Despite the huge success of Check & Reserve, Shutl further optimises conversion within the channel by taking payment up front for reservations.

Customer satisfaction:
Shutl asks every customer to provide feedback after they’ve taken receipt of their delivery, so we can share the response we’ve had back from the customers themselves, scoring across ease of use, value for money, speed of delivery and their delivery person. This form also includes a net promoter question. So far the results have been as follows:
• 27% customers leave feedback (in context, both Shutl and Argos view this as a phenomenal response rate)
• Average feedback score is 94%
• Net promoter score = 78% (with 85% of customers scoring the service a 9-10 / 10 in terms of their likelihood of recommending the service to a colleague or friend)