Move is a direct-to-consumer supermarket. We work with the World's greatest artisans to make daily staples and we ship them to you — without the middleman or the markup.
Thanks for hunting us, @chrismessina !
Hey PH — I’m Chai, the Founder of Move.
We designed Move because we wanted to see a new type of retailer- one focused on the quality of products, the ethics of its supply chain and design.
After 2 years of building, we're so proud to bring it to you.
Finally, we’d like to offer the PH community a $20 discount on the membership. Since Kickstarter doesn’t allow promo codes, we’ll simply issue a $20 refund to anyone that backs the campaign and emails us at hi@shopmove.co (just mention PH).
Thanks!
Chai
According to your video, you're not taking a margin on the products ($4 producer + $1 freight + $1 packaging + $1 shipping = $7 what you pay).. but in other documents you say that gross margins are ~40%.
Could you clarify that?
Also, when you say that you will pay producers 2x as much as any supermarket -- could you give examples of that? That doesn't seem feasible given supermarket and wholesale margins (nevermind private labels).
@sobbuh_behrouzi Not sure what context we said that in but I believe that's the difference between our economics as a business vs our economics at a per-item level.
In more specific terms, we don't markup our products but we do have a membership fee. That membership allows us to make a margin as a business.
As for the second question, roughly 60 - 70%% of the cost of a product on Move goes to the producer. At supermarkets, the "farm value" hovers around 14 - 15% of the product cost (USDA Food Dollar Series). Using liberal estimates for packaging, labor and processing, we can assume roughly 40% of the cost goes to the producer.
We publish the entire supply chain and list of prices for every product online. So when you a buy a product on Move, you can see how much money the producer makes, how much goes to packaging etc.
It is worth mentioning that private label margins tend to be much higher than traditional supermarket margins.
But the reason we can go even further is because of our vertically integrated supply chain. Point being, we're not just private labeling our products. We've actually worked with the producers to allow them to take over a lot of the work that buyers, wholesalers and distributors would be taking on in the regular supply chain. Similarly, we've also taken on a lot of that ourselves. That frees up margins to pay producers very well.
My point is that even though the output of our product resembles a supermarket, the model behind it doesn't actually conform to a lot of "grocery truisms." As a digital, D2C brand, we see a wholly different set of economics than the traditional grocer.
@chai_mishra Thanks for the response.
So your profit margin is based on membership fees but you lose money on every additional order your customers place (i.e. the more orders customers place, the higher your costs = lower profits)?
Is that a sustainable business model?
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"We've actually worked with the producers to allow them to take over a lot of the work that buyers, wholesalers and distributors would be taking on in the regular supply chain"
Could you go further into this? I'm not sure I understand how your model differs from private labelling or co-packing.
@lui_kohl We're only in the US right now but hope to launch new countries soon! We actually don't do a dollar minimum. Instead, we do an item minimum (usually 7 items). That way we can be efficient with both our business model and the environment,
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