StartupCafe

Current business model wisdom holds that increasingly, companies must provide excellent customer experiences to remain competitive. In other words, to stand out in a crowded market, successful companies must turn good products into fantastic services.

*Yawn*. That’s so boring! But wait, consider this delicious example: a new company from Newcastle (Love Your Larder) is drop-shipping gourmet foods direct from local suppliers to food-conscious consumers. What does that mean? It means that LoveYourLarder acts as a virtual distributor, matching customers with suppliers, without ever holding stock or actually shipping anything. The shipping is left to the individual food producers.

That’s cool, because it’s taking a very traditional product (like homemade jam or biscotti) and merging it with a modern service business model.

In this case, the primary service LoveYourLarder provides is marketing. The site pulls together gourmet foods from across the U.K., and then expends serious energy building a brand. Displayed on a well-marketed collective website, each product becomes more valuable and gets more attention than if it were sold on its own individual website.

Moreover, this scaling process happens without losing any of the charm associated with a handmade, gourmet good. As proof, here’s a box of biscotti from The Biscotti Kitchen, as ordered from LoveYourLarder:

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So where do you fit in? Which aspects of your industry could benefit from a sharp eye with a services approach? Which parts of the product chain could you replace, or improve upon, by adding value instead of creating goods? It’s all food for thought, and well worth eating!