Pampr
Pampr: Grocery Delivery Service
Completed orders —
1000+
Saved vacationers' time —
over 2000 hours
Regular customers —
over 560
About client
There’s a tiny, isolated island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with a population of slightly over eleven thousand people around the year except summer, when it swells to around 80,000 with the flood of vacationers.
As you can imagine, the island gets quite crowded during summer months, making simple tasks like grocery shopping exceedingly tedious. This island is called Nantucket, and that’s the business location for our client, Brady Wilson, and his product — Pampr.
Brady Wilson
Client
Brady Wilson is an entrepreneur from Nantucket, Massachusetts.
Brady Wilson had an idea on how to improve the vacationing experience for Nantucket visitors, and he went to realize his vision. He set up a grocery delivery service business with a selection of offers ranging from simple on-demand deliveries to fridge stocking to full-time butler service.
At the beginning, the service only had a phone line and a landing page, and all management was manual: handwritten notes, spreadsheets, etc. Then our client approached us for an upgrade.
The task Brady set before us was to create a local grocery delivery service with a comprehensive system that would:
- Digitize this business
- Make for smoother operations
- Increase the effectiveness of processes
And we needed to finish it before the start of the vacation season 2022.
We rose to the challenge. And together, we built Pampr.
Pampr is
In a nutshell, Pampr is a delivery service of the luxury kind: one where you’re not limited to specific stores but can order everything you need and leave it to service employees to find it.
Pampr offers vacationers the opportunity to enjoy their holidays to the fullest, without wasting time on shopping for necessities and stuck in queues.
What we did
Discovery
We started off with a series of brainstorming sessions aimed at identifying the system’s future users, their pains, and what we could do to alleviate them.
We pinpointed the three main types of users for the system and created their User stories. Our three user types were: Customers (vacationers), Butlers (runners), and Admins.
User personas
Nantucket attracts a lot of vacationers who can afford a concierge-type service and wouldn’t want to spend their precious vacation time on grocery shopping and other everyday tasks.
However, concierge services in Nantucket were few and far between. Moreover, the majority were heavily outdated, an idea of a delivery service like Pampr was unique.
Customers wanted
- To spend their vacation without wasting time on mundane tasks
- To have everything ready before their arrival at the lodging, including food
- An easy-to-use service to order everything they needed and have it delivered swiftly and without hassle
As most seasonal tourist destinations, Nantucket makes the most revenue during its prime season. Pampr butlers are mobile local residents with time on their hands, seeking an opportunity to earn extra money.
Butlers wanted
- A system to make their shop runs more efficient
- Notifications for orders to never miss the appointment
- Task tracker for easier reporting
Admins are employees managing Pampr’s activities, hiring new butlers, and distributing and monitoring orders.
Admins wanted
- A sophisticated CRM system to manage orders and butlers
- Analytics to make data-backed decisions for business growth
UI design
We implemented best practices in grocery delivery service web design for Pampr with the consideration for the brand identity.
Icon set
Development
Prior to starting development, we communicated extensively with our client to understand in-depth challenges his grocery shopping service faced. Analyzing this information allowed us to come up with solutions.
To build an intuitive interface, we employed best practices in user experience, tested on our other delivery projects.
For customers
1
Our goal was to build a convenient platform for shopping and delivery. After several iterations of UX design, we came up with a short and straightforward flow for vacationers’ registration and ordering: a two-step sign-up and a three-step ordering process.
2
We also created three different flows for customers depending on their needs: fridge stocking pre-arrival, on-demand/ daily delivery, and personal butler service with extra options. Categorized lists in ordering helped customers think of everything they needed.
3
Other necessary features included an ability to see order status, history of orders, payment functionality, and options to rate a butler, leave a review, and leave tips.
Challenge
Ordering large amounts of food and other items over a phone call was inconvenient for customers:
- A phone line can only take one order at a time
- Phone-based services are limited to business hours not always compatible with different time zones
- Making an order over the phone could result in errors due to connection quality and speech peculiarities / accents
- Big orders required a lot of time to make over the phone
Our solution
We built a mobile-responsive web platform that allowed customers to make orders without haste at any time and allowed admins to review and assign them during their business hours. A typed order was also easy to understand.
For butlers
1
Nantucket is a small island, and Pampr didn’t need thousands of employees as butlers. Hence, there was no need for an Uber-like system for butlers to register. Instead, we went with a simpler yet more failure-proof solution: butlers are approved and registered by an admin, who then sends a link with credentials to a new butler.
2
Our client conducted surveys among existing Pampr butlers to come up with the most convenient flow and features for their work.
Challenge
Unstructured shopping lists resulted in butlers spending a lot of time in stores.
Our solution
In the ordering flow for customers, we added a drop-down menu to categorize items by store department. Butlers now do not need to waste time going back and forth between departments to get something from the end of the list.
We also added functionality to checkmark items the butler already put in the cart to increase convenience and reduce the human error factor.
For admins
1
The most important features for a service admin are the ability to add, view, and manage orders and butlers.
We built a CRM system on the admin side, where admins can add and remove butlers, review orders, check receipts, and distribute payments. Admins also can check clients’ profiles to monitor order completions and butlers’ profiles to assess their performance and pay salaries.
Finally, having all the data in a single centralized CRM allowed our client to analyze business performance and plan for its expansion.
Challenge
Initially, our client had to monitor tips separately from the order cost and service fee to later send the full amounts to butlers manually, with their salary.
Our solution
To simplify and automate the process, we implemented a system for paying tips separately from the order+service payments.
When adding a new butler, a separate Stripe account is created for them. Now, when a customer leaves tips for a butler, this money goes straight to the butler’s account, bypassing the general Pampr account. This made the collaboration between Pampr and butlers transparent and trusted, and it made it possible for butlers to get some income instantly.
Pampr tech stack
We built Pampr as a web platform, with Vue.js for front-end and Ruby on Rails for backend.
For payments, we went with Stripe API since Stripe offers reliable and fast processing.
We connected Pampr’s credit account to the system through Stripe, and butlers use this account to pay; when customers pay for orders and for the service, the money goes to that account as well.
Results
The season of Summer 2022 was a success for our client. We finished all sides of the Pampr platform within two and a half months, launched it in June, right on time for the vacation season.
During the summer season of 2022, Pampr:
- Had about 560 customers
- Completed over 1000 luxury orders
- Saved vacationers over 2,000 hours of their time
In 2023, Pampr is planning to expand operations and launch a grocery delivery service app on islands neighboring Nantucket, starting with Martha’s Vineyard, MA. We are looking forward to the platform’s success.
Client’s review of Mind Studios
Brady Wilson
Client
I have found Mind Studios to be unfailingly brilliant, thoughtful, positive, patient, warm, supportive and nice, and committed to the highest standards of excellence.
Brady Wilson
Client
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