The start point of a long journey
In early November 2018, I had a trip to Lisbon. During my visit, one day I found an amazing Portuguese bakery cafe named Pastéis de Belém and after the first bite to their Pastel de nata, suddenly I fell in love with that. I never can forget my disappointment when I ate the last one at my home in Tehran. I kept asking myself why I didn’t buy more. In the next weeks, I searched everywhere to buy it online, but I had no success.
This instantly caught my attention: “Are there other people who typically want to buy food souvenirs from other parts of the world, regardless of the distance?” I had searched. The result was surprising:
There is so much academic research that shows food souvenirs arouse meaningful memories of the unique experience. The taste and social value (pride, prestige, and social needs) which create through presenting that to others can work as a trigger to influence repurchase, regardless of the distance. I found many people who asked questions like that: “how they could buy Azorean Pineapple from the US?” in TripAdvisor’s travel communities. I learned about people who immigrate and always missed the taste of their childhood and couldn’t find a direct way to buy things.
So, I wasn’t alone. But “why nobody sells food souvenirs online?” I asked myself. I tried contacting some local shop owners and producers. However, most of them didn’t answer me, but I found a friend by chance. He inherited a family business in Lisbon. He told me some local shop owners and producers are the successor of a family business, tourists are enough for some of them and others don’t have any IT skills and knowledge about the online sell. But they have one thing in common: “Most of them prefer to miss revenue opportunities online, but don’t deal with the concept of someone has to pick it up, someone has to deliver it, someone has to take it back and all other complexity of online selling.”
At that moment he shared his concern about how the small local shops and producers’ lives are depending on visitors and most of them have a financial problem in the low season. Also, some of them have to sell their harvest and products at the lowest price to aggregators or factories and the youngest prefer to leave the business and immigrate to other cities and countries. He connected me to some of his friends and all of them confirmed that with different words.
I have been thinking about creating a C2C marketplace. But it was obvious, it couldn’t solve the sellers’ problem. They already have better choices like Amazon, eBay, or even Instagram, and they don’t use them.
Another miracle happened. In early September 2019, I sat on a blue sofa in Masoud and Mina’s apartment. I was super disappointed. And I started sharing my disappointment with my friends. Masoud co-founded an Iranian startup for crowd-sourcing shipment around the world, but like most of the Iranian startups, they couldn’t survive on the depreciation of the national currency. Masoud had an excellent experience, and he solved the challenge I faced by offering to add travelers’ role. He joined me in creating a comprehensive platform to connect people around the world named Weembee.
Through the platform, buyers can find local food and beverage souvenirs from all over the cities and villages of the world and ask travelers who are already going their way to buy and bring the product to them.
You can follow Weembee at Facebook and Linkedin to find more details.
One challenge solved and lots more remained, but they couldn’t stop us anymore. In the following 8 months, we did many types of research, competitive analysis, one-to-one interview, design, and development, and finally, our minimum viable product was ready. But the story did not end: COVID-19 happened!
We stopped our launch and redefined some of our processes for a response to this new challenge. Now we are ready. Weembee will be up and running by the end of June 2020. I’m unsure what will happen, but I know we are committed to our goal, and we will solve challenges one by one.
We believe by creating Weembee, we will not only help local economies but also help each other by sharing the culture and stories of people who live around the world. By sharing culture, we can see each other as human beings and make life richer. So we can expect that all people around the world can step into the path to make peace side by side.
P.S. This story is not over yet. I decided to write about the challenges we will be faced and share my path with you. Let me know if you are interested or if you can predict what challenges we will be faced.
