🤝#5 - Meet the Partners: bodo

MITIGATE DATABASE - Featuring co-founders Brandon Neman and Jack Green.

Our ‘Meet the Partners’ series interviews the experts helping consumer goods businesses around the world get a handle on their heat. This is a paid partnership.

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A key part of any SMEs sustainability journey is aligning with innovative and trustworthy partners to help them along the way. Reducing emissions is rarely a solo act, and the marketplace of partners to help FMCG brands mitigate their emissions is rapidly expanding. It’s tricky to know where to start, who to speak to, and what exactly their company can offer. 

Our Meet the Partners series interviews the experts helping consumer goods businesses around the world get a handle on their heat. Each deep dive will provide you with insight into what makes them different, a glimpse into their work, and tips to help your business thrive.

Today we're featuring a company on our soon-to-launch MITIGATE Database - bodo.

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bodo offers instant and eco-friendly delivery for eCommerce brands - enabling brands to offer same-day or 30-minute delivery, pick-up, new sales channels, and even retail experiences. The best part? All delivery is via electronic bikes and vans, utilising reusable packaging, and relying on solar at their first site in Hackney.

bodo’s mission?

bodo is a logistics platform allowing eCommerce brands to provide customers with 30-minute and same-day delivery directly from their online store (e.g. Shopify). These options are compelling for the customer and also sustainable.

We caught up with Co-Founders Brandon Neman and Jack Green to ask them our burning questions. 

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First, let’s start with an overview of what bodo offers…

👉  What does bodo offer FMCG companies, and how does this help them reduce their environmental impact?

At bodo, we are building what we believe is the future of urban logistics— sustainable, localised distribution for eCommerce, enabled by micro-fulfilment hubs in cities. You only have to look at the size and inefficiency of a typical courier vehicle to recognise that the system is broken. One medium-sized parcel delivery is estimated to emit 40 plastic bottles worth of CO2 emissions (3.68kg CO2). The eCommerce market is expected to double by 2030, meaning double the emissions and double the problem. We need to fix our supply chain by reshaping how we deliver products from online retailers in the urban core. 

Our micro-warehouses are solar-panelled, deliveries are made by electric vehicles, and our packaging is sustainable. We deliver across London same-day, removing the need for excess packaging. Many clients utilise our ‘instant delivery’ product, which services up to 5 miles around our hubs with a 1-hour delivery proposition. Customers are used to this in food delivery, but it blows their minds to get make-up, underwear, or electronics so quickly. These deliveries are serviced almost entirely by eBikes and bicycles, and we are looking to invest in new formats of EVs that can deliver more orders and go further.

👉  How did bodo start? What’s the size of the team and where are you based?

Our founding team, Brandon Neman and Jack Green have worked in food delivery and technology for the past five years. They worked together at CloudKitchens under Uber founder, Travis Kalanick, scaling the ghost kitchen concept to over 25 countries in just four years. Having left CloudKitchens at the end of 2021, bodo launched in January. Based in east London, bodo is a team of 15 people across operations, technology, and brand management and is growing quickly.

👉  What is the step by step process of working with you to achieve this? What can brands expect?

Launching with bodo is simple: download a free Shopify app, and send stock to the nearest micro-fulfilment hub. All brands have a dedicated Partner Manager who helps with onboarding and optimising the service. This includes getting live, which usually happens in 24-48 hours, as well as marketing initiatives and CRM campaigns. 

Once live, customers browsing the brands' website see "Eco-Friendly 1 Hour Delivery" as an option at checkout. We also offer services like instant Click & Collect and integration with services like Deliveroo, UberEats, TikTok Shop, and others.

👉  Are there any additional services that you provide to FMCG brands?

We launch FMCG brands onto delivery platforms like Deliveroo and UberEats, allowing them to access a new customer pool and broaden their digital presence in different neighbourhoods. 

Let’s dig into some details...

👉  Can you give an example of an FMCG brand that you’ve worked with, and how?

Having launched in only 2019, TRIP CBD has taken the UK market by storm. They are rapidly becoming a UK household name, available across retailers up and down the country. TRIP onboarded bodo to bring customers another awesome way of accessing their product; instant and sustainable delivery. TRIP integrated quickly and sent a selection of CBD beverage and oil best-sellers to bodo’s east London hub. Customers in east London can now get their favourite TRIP products in 30 minutes, while the whole of London (M25) can access them by the end of the day.

👉 What common misconceptions do consumer goods brands have about reducing their last mile emissions? Any typical surprises?

Most customers and brands don't realise how damaging the last mile is. Many brands we work with are sustainably sourced and manufactured but are being let down by their 3rd party logistics providers. From vehicle emissions (road and air) to superfluous packaging, the eCommerce supply chain is becoming an added pressure our planet cannot afford.

👉  How much do your services cost?

Our same-day delivery service, which services all of Greater London (~17 million households within the M25), is £6 per delivery. Our same-day delivery allows customers to order by 5pm and receive the product by the evening. 

Our instant delivery service currently services east and central London (~2 million households) and is £7.50 per delivery. As we have cold and frozen storage, the service has enabled many beauty, beverage, and food brands to deliver their products ready for use to customers.

👉  How long does a typical project take with you, or how long does a typical brand relationship last? Are there any examples of projects you can give?

We are so early in our journey and are working on some exciting product launches for the end of the year. We want to grow our network across many cities in the coming years, allowing more and more brands and customers to benefit from the service. Whilst we have worked for specific brands on product drops and activations, we believe our brand partners will keep the service live on an ongoing basis. We have retained 100% of our brands since we started.

Finally…

👉 Have you collaborated with any MEASURE partners to help brands measure their impact? 

Not yet, but this is something we are scoping. We track our metrics internally, and pass these to our partner brands for visibility. But we’d like to productise this process, so that end-customers have visibility of their conscious consumerism.

👉  Our MITIGATE database aims to help brands tangibly reduce their environmental impact. Can you quantify a brand’s reduction in emissions and/or environmental impact, and if so, how?

We are working on an exciting API partnership that we will announce soon, allowing customers to quantify the impact of their decision to select sustainable delivery instead of standard methods. As part of this partnership, brands will also gain access to a dashboard that consolidates this data across all order types so that they can make informed decisions about their supplier network in the logistics space.

👉 What’s next? Do you have any exciting announcements or platform developments that we can expect to see in the future? 

We are working on an exciting product launch early next year that will allow enterprise retailers and independent boutiques to offer our services from their own physical infrastructure. We want any business, big or small, to benefit from our technology as it allows them to leverage their existing infrastructure more efficiently and sustainably.

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What next?

👉 Check out bodo’s LinkedIn and Instagram.

👉 Looking for a partner to MITIGATE your emissions? Reach out to the bodo team via their website to explore working with them!

👉 Want to be featured in a ‘Meet the Partners’ spotlight? Reach out here!

Meet the bodo team. Source: Own.