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Project Overview
Booodl is the best tool for shopping locally. Through the app, users can easily find nearby stores that stock items they want and message shop assistants. From there they can head in-store to buy, or purchase in-app with the ‘Tap + Buy’ feature. It brings the ease of online shopping to the physical retail world.
Users will also get a push notification when anything on their list is stocked nearby – it’s like a personal shopping assistant in your pocket. That means no more kick-yourself moments when you forget to pick up those Nespresso capsules!
Organisation
Team
George Freney - CEO and Founder
Rajat Kulshrestha - Chief Technology Officer
Gavin Turner - Lead UX/UI Designer
Andy Lovegrove - Front End Developer
Alexey Ishkov - iOS Developer
Steve Muss - Software Engineer
Javier Argote - Software Engineer
Mick Heywood - Software Engineer
Nimrod Gorali - Product Manager
Anna Bray - Marketing Manager
Raffaella Ciccarelli - Community Manager
Virginia Brown - Retail Manager
Project Brief
We're shaking up the whole in-store shopping experience by simplifying the way users find, remember and buy what they want.
Have you trekked to a store only to find out they no longer stock what you want? Or arrived home to discover you forgot to pick up one of the items you went to the shops for in the first place? If you’ve gone shopping, chances are you’ve found yourself at the end of this frustrating situation more than once. You're not alone; it's a common occurrence begging for a solution.
It's this very situation that lead our CEO and Founder, George Freney, to start Booodl. He found himself at Bondi Junction where he forgot to buy the jeans he had been meaning to pick up. Upon realising this, and trying fruitlessly to find them stocked closer to home, the idea for the app was born.
Our vision is to make it beautifully simple to locate a local store that sells the products you want (whether that be a specific or vague want) and chat with someone at the store, saving you time and fuss.
We’ve kicked this off in our own backyard - Sydney, Australia - with seven well-known retail partners. We've validated our idea, seen great early traction and we're now gearing up to scale; first Australia-wide, then globally.
Project Need
Booodl addresses a clear need for users and retail stores.
The way we currently discover, remember and eventually buy the products we want is complex. Say you find something you want to purchase, you have to either screenshot it, record it in a list app such as Evernote, or on the likes of Pinterest. These solutions are fragmented and none of them take it one step further to remind users when it’s convenient to buy. You also can’t search products in nearby stores the way you can search products online.
Booodl addresses this need through seamless adding of content, smart geo-notifications, a user-to-store messaging platform, and a simplified payment system. Essentially, users can pop into a local shop, have a chat with the store owner and browse their products…all from the convenience of a phone.
Our activity so far validates this need. Since launch in late 2014, over 27,000 products have been added to users’ lists, in excess of 8,000 reminder notifications have been sent, and more than 4,000 messages have been exchanged between stores and retailers.
For retailers, the need is simple: connect with local customers, get more people in-store and increase sales. Through Booodl, retail stores can increase footfall, message their customers and get data around in-store shopping behaviour.
User Experience
For our users to have the best experience possible, we have to cater for the different ways people shop. After extensive testing and some brilliant feedback from our users, we’ve realised that people shop one of two ways: either they know exactly what they’re after, or they only have a vague idea. For example, where one person may add ’Black Nike Free Run 5.0’ to their list, another user may simply want ‘black runners’.
To provide this experience, we’ve surveyed a huge array of brands and categories stocked in local stores. We then built an advanced system that matches each search query to a store and returns the results in the form of an interactive local map.
It was very important to us that this map be interactive. It allows our users to explore and discover their local area, regardless of what a query turns up, and facilitates connection between users and stores: making shopping one beautiful, seamless process.
Project Marketing
Our marketing efforts have been focused on acquiring Sydney users through retail partnerships, social advertising and good old word of mouth. Our wonderful retail partners help spread the word to their customer base, while consistently cheap app install costs have helped kick start our early growth.
We're now ready to really ramp up our marketing activities and spread the Booodl mission far and wide. Our growth plan ongoing (for retailers and consumers) involves further investment in digital advertising, continued promotional activities with our existing and new retail partners, PR and content marketing.
PR will play a big role in the next few months. We were recently picked up and covered by Springwise as one of their most innovative ideas (which translated to great download results) so you can expect more of the same later this year!
Project Privacy
Booodl is an entirely private ecosystem. We're a personal tool that helps to manage a user's list of wanted products. As such, we don't have an in-app community; you can't follow other Booodlrs nor can you access other Booodlr's profiles. Your profile is yours and yours alone, so never fear, no one will ever know that L'Occitane is responsible for your youthful glow!
The only personal information that will be visibly displayed to another party is a first-name when a user sends through a chat. All other data lives within our private database, which only a few select Booodl employees have access to.
We also perform security testing regularly to identify and resolve any vulnerabilities. All communications between our users and retailers use TLS 1> protocol. These connections are encrypted and authenticated using AES_128_GCM and ECDHE_RSA as the key exchange mechanism. It is our priority to make sure we stay up to date with security recommendations and industry standards.
Finally when it comes to purchasing, all Credit Card information is securely hosted via the third party service, Stripe. Neither ourselves, nor our stores, can see a customer's payment details.
Best New Service or Application
This can be any new service or application from a start-up to an industry leader. It’s not just bells and whistles we're after but true innovation, exceeding expectations and filling a void that had previously been open.
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