Retail is tough, but Patrick Dekker and his Wundermart co-founder Laurens de Kleine are on a mission. The mission is to democratise retail itself. With COVID-19 disproportionately affecting physical retail, Wundermart is doubling down on its mission of helping “anyone, anywhere to open up shop.”
From hobby to a business idea
Patrick Dekker says the idea of Wundermart didn’t germinate right off the bat. In fact, Dekker and his co-founder Laurens de Kleine were actually working on a different company. Before Wundermart, Patrick and Laurens were working on a grab and go product. Patrick says it was a hobby more than a business idea. But once this hobby was off the ground, Wundermart was becoming a viable business idea.
Dekker says that when they went to market (hospitality sector) with their grab-and-go retail idea, they realised that hotels were “getting into little shops in the lobby”. While Wundermart co-founders won’t call this their lightbulb moment, it can be termed as one. This was the moment when the seeds were sowed for Wundermart, and there was never looking back. For years, lobby shops have been a trend in the US, but Patrick says they imagined this lobby shop to be more than just a pantry or a little shop.
The idea around these lobby shops is that you grab a product and pay for it at the reception. If you have been to a hotel reception, then you would know the processing can be slow, and Patrick says they were struck by this inefficiency. Their business model was born, which basically eliminates this inefficiency.
“We were selling these food products to these hotels, but they were struggling with the actual operation of it. And we were like, there are so many things that could be improved here. Although we were not retail experts at that time, we knew one thing for sure, if we spend a little bit of time and focus on this, [we could build] better than what we were currently seeing. So we jumped into it,” Patrick explains.
Problem Solving at the heart of the business
Every company or startup starts with a mission. While Wundermart is a retail startup, its mission is rooted in solving problems that plague the retail experience. “There were many problems paying at the reception at a hotel which makes grab-and-go experience into a grab and wait experience,” Patrick explains the root problem of grab-and-go shops. “So, payment had to be solved,” he adds.
The first step in streamlining the grab and go shop experience was to install a self-scan payment terminal. This solved the payment problem, but the second step was a conscious decision that makes Wundermart akin to companies like Apple. Patrick says he and his co-founder decided from the beginning that they “need to develop everything ourselves and in house”.
Armed with an in-house design and development cycle, Wundermart was now ready to fix grab and go experience. Once the payment problem was resolved, Patrick says they noticed how it doesn’t make any sense for hotels to manually continue to order the products. To solve this hurdle, Patrick and Laurens built their own ERP that enables “automatic ordering with selected suppliers”.
One can say that the initial days of building Wundermart would have been similar to playing Jenga. Like how you go on and on in Jenga, Patrick and Laurens went on with their mission to solve the root problems of grab and go experience. They added electronic shelf labels, promotional screens, which all culminated into an end-to-end solution.
After operating nearly 60 such hotel shops with its own back-end technology, Patrick says they realised they were really “onto something” since these hotel shops were making quite a good revenue. From there on, it was no looking back and Wundermart used the rich data gathered from these shop experiences to build a cohesive product that remains easy to deploy and effortless to scale.
Shopify for physical retail
The COVID-19 pandemic affected physical retail disproportionately compared to online retail. While physical retail shops shuttered, online retail was thriving but Patrick says there remains a need for physical retail, especially the one built on the Wundermart model. A grab-and-go model eliminates interaction that you would experience at big retail chains. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it was suddenly a boon for the hospitality sector to have a physical retail channel that reduced interaction and thus exposure.
However, the pandemic also brought the much-needed realisation for the company to transition from being the installer, operator and formula owner of a shop to the platform company. They started working with hotel chains like nh hotels and Radisson Hotel Group to become the technology partner. Today, Wundermart is essentially a food market that runs itself. As a technology partner, it has built a platform that is essentially the Shopify for physical retail allowing anyone with a location to set up shop with just a few steps.
Scaling the business model
Patrick says Wundermart is now doing multiple channels offices, co-working spaces and now looking into other channels such as unmanned gas stations. In this quest to scale Wundermart, Patrick and Laurens joined Techleap’s Rise programme and successfully raised €10.5m during an investment round led by Kees Koolen last month.
Patrick says his experience with Rise has been positive, and it was appropriate for Wundermart, which is in the phase of scale up. He notes that Techleap’s Rise has a good reputation in the Netherlands, and for him, assessing how much time he can devote to the programme was critical behind joining batch #4.
He adds the reason that drove him to Rise was the fact that “they are trying to create a healthy environment for young starting and scaling technology companies in the Netherlands.” He says that this environment is necessary for Dutch startups because the culture is one where people frown upon rising up too much.
This is in stark contrast to startups based in the US, where the founders become celebrities overnight. He adds that Techleap is trying to create a culture where Dutch people are proud of these startups and entrepreneurs, which according to Patrick, is an atypical thing to do in the Netherlands.
Patrick transforms himself into a poet when talking about the Dutch startup culture and contrast with the one found in the US. He says Techleap’s Rise programme is helping a number of interesting startups and scaleups in the Netherlands to imagine their goal of making the “world a better place”. But he is quick to note that they are doing so without attaining the rock star fandom seen with US startup founders.
He further adds that the Rise programme helped him understand that the problems or issues faced by a startup like Wundermart are not unique to itself. Other startups face similar problems, and learning from them was valuable. He also sees Rise helping young startups and their founders learn from the mistakes of others and thus reach their goals in a more streamlined and efficient way.
Story is the mission and not us
“We strongly believe in the power of physical retail,” says Patrick, as he believes, as long as humans keep moving, there will be a need for physical retail shops. He says that they want the story to be about the mission of Wundermart and not about himself or his co-founder Laurens. He wants the story to be about its mission to democratise physical retail and not entangle themselves into the spotlight. The mission is so critical that Wundermart has also achieved the very first goal.
It has successfully demonstrated that the idea of unmanned grab-and-go retail will not only work but thrive. The second goal for Patrick and Laurens is to turn Wundermart into “Shopify for Physical Retail” in the next two years. As mentioned earlier, they are well on their way to meeting this goal. Wundermart is led by visionaries who see the startup democratising retail in the next decade. With each stepping stone, they are getting closer to meeting that goal as well.
