Why Fast Company Named Alfred One of the 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World
This week Fast Company named Alfred, the company I co-founded with Jessica Beck, among the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies.
Just three years after launching, we are grateful to make the list aside omnipresent greats like Apple, Tencent, and companies sending rockets into space.
We were also recognized on the Top 10 Innovators in Retail, with Amazon, Walmart and Everlane.
Up until this point, Alfred has largely been known as a concierge service, helping urban residents save time by shopping for groceries, picking up dry cleaning, and tidying up. Or as Fast Company put it “being the city dweller’s secret superpower.”
Why, then, did they call us a retail company?
Because the Fast Company editors are on to our own not-so-secret superpower: Alfred is the first in-home commerce platform. With retail and e-commerce companies racing to extend the so-called Last Mile right to our doors, we believe the future of retail is in the home — and we are the only company making that a reality by seamlessly integrating products, services, and experiences into our clients’ households.
Your trusty sidekick
We founded Alfred in September 2014 on the premise that time is our most precious, non-renewable resource, and that it shouldn’t be a luxury. While we couldn’t create more time for people, we could help them save it and make the most of it by taking care of to-dos and anticipating them so they didn’t have to sweat the details of modern city living.
Inspired by Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s ever-faithful butler, we conceived Alfred to be a trusty sidekick who takes care of your weekly chores so you can go be a superhero. And at the heart of that vision was a bold ambition: to be one of the most trusted companies in the world — so trusted that people would allow us inside their most personal spaces, their homes.
We started by putting ourselves on the line. Jess and I became the Alfreds, doing people’s chores, taking care of their to-dos, learning how they lived and how we could help lighten the load of everyday life. While we knew that technology and automation would be important elements, we believed that only personal relationships — based on trust, empathy, and human intuition — would enable us to scale help for our clients. After all, Alfred served up bleeding-edge tech and cool tools, but it was Alfred himself, taking care and coordinating everything, that enabled Bruce Wayne to go be a superhero. Focusing on that human component has made all the difference.
More than one million home visits later, we are especially proud that Alfred is the only company to have earned the trust and the privilege of entering our clients’ homes while they’re away. This bond of trust is the foundation of a unique in-home hospitality platform that is now a built-in amenity for the thousands of building residents across six cities.
The smarter home
Winning that trust and learning everyday how to better serve our clients has led us to envisioning a truly smart home — one that anticipates and fulfills our needs through a powerful combination of personalized hospitality, artificial intelligence, and click-free commerce.
A truly smart home is about much more than intelligent speakers, bulbs, thermostats, and interchangeable locks. In the smarter home we’re building, help is an integrated utility that enables our household needs and regular purchases to be entirely automated, intuitive, and hyper-personalized.
We believe more and more households will welcome in-home hospitality and commerce as a non-invasive, on-demand, always-on operating system that runs in the background to get things done. When a new carton of oat milk magically appears on our refrigerator shelf; toiletries are replenished before we think of it; our best suit, freshly pressed, hangs in the closet before the next day’s meeting; a friendly reminder about an upcoming anniversary comes with useful gift recommendations; and a bouquet of our favorite flowers welcomes us when we walk through the door after a long business trip — that’s when home truly feels like our own corner of the world.
The future of urban living
And we believe that everyone’s personal corner can be even more connected to the world around it, now more than ever before.
Through our partnerships with residential buildings, real estate developers like Related, and local businesses, we are strengthening the residential and commercial ecosystems of the neighborhoods we serve. Imagine coming home to find your re-soled boots back from the cobbler down the block, your dog gnawing on a new rawhide from the pet store across the street, and a fully prepared dinner from your favorite neighborhood spot waiting on the table.
Alfred is working to make this vision of everyday luxury into an everyday reality — where cities are designed to work for and in harmony with their inhabitants, where our homes take care of us and help is there for the asking, where everyone can reclaim the time and headspace to be extraordinary.
Marcela
