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Launching the private beta of a brick-and-mortar retail delivery service on Black Friday “may or may not be a good idea.” That’s what bringhub co-founder and COO Philip Pantelides said about his social marketplace and same-day delivery company bringhub’s November 29 launch date.
But timing has always a bit unorthodox for the bringhub team, which consists of Philip and his brothers, CEO Dominik and CTO Oliver. The three brothers built the entire bringhub platform over the past three months from three different cities via Google hangouts without any outside help.
That also may or may not have been a good idea.
But, so far, the brothers’ intuitions seem to be pointing them in an upward trajectory: they are currently raising an angel round, just brought a full-time acquisition manager on board, are moving their office to Santa Monica and have their sights set on a public launch in December.
This may all seem to be moving quite fast, but actually the bringhub idea has been simmering for years. In 2007, Dominik started Bloomsburrys.de, a premier restaurant delivery service, in Berlin. After selling the company four years later, he began working on an idea similar to Postmates, but found that “that business model doesn’t work very well from our experience,” Philip said.
Dominik realized that customers often end up overpaying for a delivery service if the company providing it has high overhead. So the bringhub band of brothers was assembled to solve this problem and what they ended up with was an online marketplace and discovery platform that uses existing structures to execute same-day deliveries.
“What we’re trying to do is basically bring the city to you by making shopping your cities as simple and easy as shopping online,” Philip said. “And we manage to do it without any extra overhead really to us.”
bringhub partnered with six of LA’s biggest same-day courier companies that used to deliver things like legal documents and that now welcome the extra business because of document digitization. Because of this, bringhub didn’t have to spend too much time on the logistics of delivery: over 300 experienced couriers were been on board since the beginning.
Not only are six courier companies welcoming bringhub to LA, but 25 independent LA merchants have also signed up so far to use the services. Not only is there extra value added when brick-and-mortar retailers can provide delivery services to their customers, but merchants can also get to know their buyers even better through bringhub’s social component.
bringhub users are able to ‘high-five’ local merchants and share their discoveries within Google Circle-like interest groups. This way, bringhub can learn users’ product interests and also create social shopping network for users: “It’s the way people shop in real life essentially; they shop with their friends who are interested in the same things,” Philip said.
So LA shoppers can share their favorite Santa Monica surf shop and help those in Hollywood, who may not often survive the traffic to Santa Monica, discover it. This is why the three brothers, who were all living in different cities earlier this year, decided on headquartering bringhub in LA.
“We didn’t go to Silicon Valley for the reason that our company is more based around lifestyle and people’s needs as opposed to being in a tech bubble,” Philip said. “LA is great for what we are doing.”
