The Revolutionary of Roaming Retail
Per Cromwell discovered his passion for roaming retail selling newspapers at 13. He later cofounded Wheelys, a global chain of bicycle-based cafes and his latest venture Moby is putting the convenience back in convenience stores by bringing them to you.
Interview by Justin Harlow | Editor
JH: Today, I’m here with Per Cromwell, a true revolutionary of roaming retail. For years, Per has been at the forefront of a mobile movement that believes retail should come to you, not the other way around. He’s the Co-Founder of Wheelys, a global network of bicycle-based organic cafes present in more than 50 countries. His latest venture, Moby Mart, is developing the world’s first unmanned convenience stores on wheels with a mission to bring world class retail to a million tiny villages around the world. Per, it’s wonderful to have you with us today.
PC: Thank you, very glad to be here.
JH: So, I’d like to start off by getting your thoughts on the current state of the retail business, which seems to be experiencing some difficulties right now.
PC: Yes, indeed. A lot of people say that the next five years in retail will bring more change than we’ve seen in the last 50 years. When you think about it, not much has happened in the last 100 years in retail. You used to enter a store, come up to the counter and ask the guy who stood behind the counter what you wanted and then he would get the stuff you wanted, you would pay him and then you would leave.
The big shift until now has been that the customer themselves have been allowed to walk around, pick the stuff up and bring it to the counter before paying. The rest has been fine-tuning, but now things seem to be changing rapidly and the state of retail seems to be a little confused, but also a bit desperate. It seems like every year now there’s a new record year of physical retailers going bankrupt. I think we will see a lot of changes in the world of retail and I’m very happy to be a part of this.
JH: What do you think those changes would be? What do you think the megatrends are that are shaping the retail business?
PC: I see two megatrends. One of the trends is automation, which we see in China, where we have one of our bases. Two years ago there was nobody talking about autonomous or staffless retail. Recently, I visited an expo in Shanghai and there were 70 or 80 different players in the staffless retail scene. So, this is one of the big changes in retail, trying to make it more efficient and compete with online retail. The other big trend is making it more customized, focusing on the customer journey and experience.
JH: You seem to have been interested in bringing retail experiences to the consumer for a while, which seems like another megatrend. I’d love to hear your thoughts on why you became interested in it and what it’s looked like over the years.
PC: I think I can tell you pretty precisely when I first got interested in roaming retail. I was 13 years old and I was saving money for the Millennium Falcon spaceship. It was way too expensive for what I could afford at that time with my weekly allowance so I realized I had to earn some more money. Then my neighbor Olaf came one day and asked if we should start selling newspapers from bicycles. We did that for some time, but it was a bit tough. So, then we realized that rather than going door to door, we should try to sell newspapers where we thought there were a lot of potential customers in one place.
I think I can tell you pretty precisely when I first got interested in roaming retail. I was 13 years old and I was saving money for the Millennium Falcon spaceship.
We started down at the ferry terminal. This was in the 1980s and waiting in the ’80s before smartphones was extremely boring. So, we packed our bags and took our bikes down to the ferry terminal and started selling newspapers to the people waiting in line for the next ferry. In 30 minutes, we managed to sell more newspapers than we were able to sell in weeks when we were going from door to door.
Quite quickly we realized we could sell newspapers on the other side of the water so we took turns going back and forth with the ferry selling newspapers to the people waiting. So, this was my first international business trip and it was a great success. Quite quickly I was able to save enough money to buy the spaceship. This was my first fundamental experience in how powerful it can be to actually bring the business to where the customers are.
JH: It’s funny you say that, because you’re clearly way smarter than I am. Like most kids, I had a paper round as we call it in England too. But, I think I had the worst paper round in history because the average length of the driveways I had to deliver to was about 200 yards, so I wish I would have had your brilliance back then. I think I lasted about 6 weeks.
PC: I think I endured about 6 weeks myself actually trying to go from door to door before trying to find where I could find a lot of customers in one place.
JH: In 2014, you really start to put that roaming retail experience into practice when you become a Co-Founder at Wheelys. Before we go any further, I have to talk about your bio on the website. Illegal flights over Belarus, forged passports, what on earth was that all about?
PC: That’s a very good question. I was working for many many years in communication design, trying to help other people solve their problems. That could be anything from helping brands to be more innovative to more concrete problems that they had.
The problem in Belarus was that it’s actually the last dictatorship in Europe. There have been no free elections and nobody seemed to be talking about the situation in Belarus. So, we figured out that we could support a protest that was already going on in Belarus by dropping teddy bears holding signs demanding free speech from parachutes over Belarus.
So, it ended up that we learned to fly ourselves, bought an airplane and teddy bears and we illegally flew over the border and dropped teddy bears over the capital Minsk.
We thought this was a brilliant idea, but a little dangerous, because Belarus has a strong Russian air defense. They had previously shot down people navigating without permission over Belorussian airspace. We asked a lot of pilots and daredevils if they would do this for us, but they all said “We’re not the crazy ones, you’re the crazy ones.” So, it ended up that we learned to fly ourselves, bought an airplane and teddy bears and we illegally flew over the border and dropped teddy bears over the capital Minsk.
It resulted in a lot of discussion. The dictator, Lukashenko, had to admit that he didn’t have strong air defenses. Everybody was laughing at him. He had to fire some generals and the Minister of Defense and we were able to generate a lot of talk and awareness about this situation in Belarus.
JH: So, tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind Wheelys and a little about the business itself.
PC: Wheelys came about, because we had a girl working with us at the agency called Maria De La Croix, who couldn’t get a job at Starbucks because her hair was too blue. We wanted to help her start her own cafe. We wanted to create something very cheap to start, so we put it on a bicycle. After three years, Wheelys is actually in more countries than Starbucks.
It’s a small 3-wheeler bike where you have everything you need to brew coffee. You have a gas stove, running water, refrigeration, so, that’s basically all you need to go where the clients are and sell coffee, that could be the train station in the morning or outside the football stadium in the evening, or outside the business park during the day.
JH: I understand that you were heavily involved with the design aspect of Wheelys. What were some of the design challenges that you faced as you were developing those mobile cafes?
PC: It’s a little bit like designing a sailboat. You need to fit a lot of functionality into a small space. If you want to have a fully-fledged cafe on a bike and it can’t weigh more than 150 kilos, you have to work really hard on the engineering part. We had to learn how to fit water tanks, gas tanks and wastewater tanks.
We also had to learn how to comply with the different permitting legislations. It was a tricky task to create a bicycle that not only had all the functions, but also met the requirements, how much water you need, how the sinks should be designed, what materials you should use, so it was a complicated equation to make these bikes work and get them approved.
Wheelys came about, because we had a girl working with us at the agency called Maria De La Croix, who couldn’t get a job at Starbucks because her hair was too blue.
JH: That’s fascinating. I think I mentioned to you in a previous conversation that I was in Guatemala a couple of weeks ago and everybody seemed to know Wheelys there. Now you’re in over 50 countries, what do you think makes the Wheelys franchise so popular with the people that operate bikes in these different countries across the world?
PC: I think there are many parts to it. It’s a dream of freedom. I think that’s a dream that becomes stronger and stronger when we get more and more tangled up in modern life and modern society. In one sense, I think Wheelys has come to represent this dream of being your own boss and working when you want while meeting real people as well.
I also think Wheelys is a movement empowering young entrepreneurs to start their own business. We’re a small company and we have to rely on Wheelers helping other Wheelers. So, I think people long to belong to something and I think the Wheelys cafe is something where they can share their experiences or tips, tricks and worries with people from all over the world.
JH: So, let’s move on to your latest venture Moby. What is it?
PC: Moby is basically a mobile store on wheels, which is open 24/7 and it’s always close to you. It’s a store that actually knows you. You could compare it to a merger between a delivery truck and a store.
JH: What was the inspiration behind the Mobys concept and how do they work?
PC: Moby is a development of the Wheelys concept. We had very positive experiences selling other things from these bikes. Obviously, there are some limitations from what you can sell from a bicycle, so we just took that concept and scaled it up.
In order, first of all you locate the nearest store from an app on your phone. Once you’re a registered customer, you’re able to enter the store using your app and facial recognition. Then you do all your purchasing through your app using different techniques such as scanning, tracking systems or sensors. We have an AI, which you can always ask who actually knows you and your preferences. This AI can know your shopping list, play your favorite music and basically adjust the store to your own preferences. Then you pay through your phone and you just exit and that’s it.
I would say that the vision for Moby is trying to address the three biggest costs in retail, which are rent, staff and logistics. By making them staffless, we will make them more profitable. By making them mobile, we pay less or no rent. And, by making them self-driving, which will be the case in 5 or 10 years, we will always be able to address the logistics issues.
JH: I would encourage anyone listening to check out the YouTube promo video for Moby Mart. I’ve shown a couple of people and the feedback has been incredible. I’m a little scared personally about the hologram, because when you talk about AI as I feel if she knows me too well she’s going to tell me I’m still a few pounds overweight and that direct me to the fruit section on the right.
PC: Maybe we can put in some options which limit the type of advice she will give you.
JH: So, what type of products do you think are suitable for sale in Moby Marts and is there anything that you couldn’t sell?
PC: Let’s start with what we can sell. The way we’ve designed it so far is that it’s a better version of 7 Eleven with a more premium, organic, ecological and sustainable product than the standard 7 Eleven assortment. As soon as we started to present this Moby, people started contacting us with really interesting ideas about how you could transform the Moby into different kinds of stores, everything from book stores, to fashion stores, to toy stores.
I don’t really see a big limitation on what you can sell. Of course, the Moby is designed so that it can drive on regular roads. The width can’t be more than 2.5 meters and the length is about 10 meters, so given those size limitations there may be some limitations for the products you can fit in the store. But, if you regard it as more of a showroom and experience for the customers, I think you can actually solve many display problems by using screens and AR/VR solutions of different kinds.
There are so many places that have seen the last store close down 10, 20 or 30 years ago and people have to drive further and further to get a liter of milk.
JH: You mentioned before that you were able to target some of the biggest costs in retail, that must open up a lot of new geographical locations for you guys. There are obviously a lot of locations that wouldn’t justify a store on a standalone basis because of its costs and maybe it wouldn’t justify a full-time store, whereas you guys travel around so if you’re in a given location one day a week, you’re picking up peak demand at any time. What type of areas are suited to Moby as you build out this model over time?
PC: I think we will start in the rural areas because these are places where we see we can make good. There are so many places that have seen the last store close down 10, 20 or 30 years ago and people have to drive further and further to get a liter of milk. As you say, it’s often not profitable enough to run a full-time small convenience store in a village of 500 or 1,000 people.
One of our biggest learnings is that when you make a lot of these stores you can make them cheap to buy. If you were to compare building a store to building a car using local people, this car will cost a lot. That is the case when you open a store, you need to rely on local carpenters and local electricians and it’s hard to find a scale advantage in making a lot of stores.
Quite often it’s the opposite. If you open up a lot of stores in one location, the rent goes up and it becomes even more expensive. If we on the other hand build hundreds or thousands of these, we can make them very cheap to buy and run and we can once again make it profitable to run these stores in the countryside.
JH: Do you think as these Mobys start operating across the world, they will be selling the same product in different locations or is there scope to be selling different products in the same location? On Mondays, it could be books, on Tuesdays it could be something. How do you think these Mobys will be developed over time?
PC: These Mobys will be much smarter than a regular store and since they’re mobile they’re quite easy to restock. The whole idea is that the Moby should know their customers. So, depending on where they operate they will be equipped and selling different things. Depending on what time of day it is they can offer different kinds of products. During lunch hour we can fill it up with pre-made foods, salads, sandwiches and other kinds of dishes. In the evening, there may be a different assortment and on weekends it will change again.
So, by knowing our customers and their preferences, we hope to create a retail solution which is much smarter than what you can find today, because I don’t understand why 95% of 7 Elevens sell the same stuff in all their stores.
There are so many places that we currently don’t address well. Everything from festivals to sporting events or even small villages by the seaside where there are only people for a couple of months every year and other than that there’s nobody there. So, by knowing our customers and their preferences, we hope to create a retail solution which is much smarter than what you can find today, because I don’t understand why 95% of 7 Elevens sell the same stuff in all their stores. I guess it’s because they don’t really know their customers. The Moby is completely different. There will not be two Mobys selling the same stuff, because it will all be customized to the people that live in the area where the Moby is operating.
JH: There’s so much data available these days. How do you think that data can be used to drive locational optimization? Is that something that the individual Moby owners would do or is that something you would advise them on from Moby HQ?
PC: First of all we would use the data to optimize the stores and to create a better shopping experience and to make the convenience store as convenient as we can. We’ll also use the data to make predictions. Using big data and AI we’ll be able to predict where to go in real-time. Also, because you need to be a registered user to use the Moby, we can also see where people are located. If we see all of a sudden that there is an opportunity for a store, like there’s an event or festival or something we haven’t thought of, we can then use heat maps to see that there a lot of customers in one place and then we can move the store to that location.
JH: It’s funny, in many ways it goes back a little bit to the past, which given how futuristic these things are is a little surprising. In my mind I’m thinking that the milkman used to deliver your milk, there used to be a traveling library and they don’t exist as much anymore, so, as futuristic as this is, I think there are a lot of things that it’s bringing back from the past that have simply been taking out from communities because they were no longer cost effective, right?
PC: Exactly. If you watch Downtown Abbey, you also see the food truck delivering things. So, absolutely, this is nothing revolutionary. The revolution is that we combine it with modern technology and it becomes automated and self-driving and staffless and it can be more efficient because it knows the customer.
JH: Well Per, this has been fantastic. I definitely look forward to seeing Mobys in and around my neighborhoods too. I think it’s a fantastic approach to retail which really hasn’t changed in the last 50 years and you guys seem to be the guys that can help change that. I appreciate your time and best of luck going forward.
PC: Thank you so much, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.
