Celebrating the worst week of the year 🍾 🎈
I wanted to kick-off a Summer update from GG HQ with a little celebration, though it might seem unusual to welcome statistically the worst week of the year, the only way is up!
This chart shows order numbers as a % variance by week vs the average number of orders (per week) across the year.
When running a box scheme there was always a point in August when I worried customers wouldn’t come back, even though I knew they always did - hopefully this chart helps offer some reassurance, as well as an insight into what the selling year looks like (probably for you but definitely for others) across our world of UK veg boxes.
- Just how BAD Summer holidays are for box sales, average performance for a cross-section of users this week [week 33] is -16.57%, however some individual users are up to 25% down vs their own average!! 😭
- How reliable the impact of holidays are, we can quite clearly see how half-term in Feb, May and October impact order numbers. Easter is far more significant (see blue circles on the chart)
- The opportunity we have to do something about it! Now we are beginning to understand what the data looks like, we can start to think proactively about how to innovate, helping plan-for, and mitigate the impact holidays have in the future. Any gains we can enable go straight on your bottom line. 📈
- For growers, it will be interesting to look at how volume of home-grown produce and average gross-margin per box compares across the year. We know the (cruel 😈) reality is that demand starts to drop as the hungry-gap ends, then peak supply (and therefore profit potential) is closely matched with the lowest-demand, but getting the data into a model will no doubt paint a more accurate picture and hopefully trigger some innovative thinking around how we can help supply and demand get along a little better. Watch this space. 🤓
- The questions posed by the data feel important; how can we stop a 2 week Easter break resulting in x3 negatives weeks of sales? What messaging can we help automate to stop blanket-order-pauses when schools are out? How can we better-segment customers, by school-aged children, household income and likelihood of foreign holidays? Do ideal box contents change in the holidays? Is availability of specific add-ons more likely to result in customer retention? 🤔
Our system architecture is configured to enable this sort of deep-data-analysis and we’re creeping towards a point when we’ll be able to dedicate some more engineering time on bringing this to life. We’ll then make it work for you on a individual basis, ultimately with a tool becoming available within your admin. In the meantime, I will continue to share what I hope are valuable insights that can be used proactively.
If you’d like to be involved in some veg box statistical geekiness and help us find answers to some of our questions - get in touch with me on discord. The more the merrier!
Number of orders per week taken across a selection of 10 users from 2023 and 2024
Order volume 58% England and 42% Scotland (to allow for a different holiday schedule, Scottish schools go back around 3 weeks earlier in the Summer than England and Wales)
A variety of box schemes but all established, i.e. not going through early-stage growth that may skew numbers
Because our platform is still ‘new’, much of the data for early 2023 isn’t available and non of the data past week 33 2024 has been used to calculate averages - assumption made that the average across such a volume of orders and dovetailing the end of 2023 and start of 2024 will reliably show trends required
Team & Recruitment 🙋🏽♂️ 🤷🏼♂️ 🙅🏾♂️ 🙆🏻♂️ + 🦹🏻
We are delighted to have recruited 4 (4!!) new engineers in recent months having said farewell to Michael earlier in the year 👋🏼, this takes our team of developers to 5, lead by our CTO Renee, who we’ll hear a little from below. This is game-changing for us and we’re very excited about what it will mean for our pace of development. It feels quite incredible to have 5 talented developers working round-the-clock to make our platform the best in the world for selling veg boxes. Veg-commerce is my new (and cheesy) term for it! 🥕 🛒 🧀
We are a remote-by-design business without the overheads of a bricks and mortar HQ and have embraced the opportunity to recruit talent to join us from around the world. Following async working best-practice we have built a team across one region in South and Central America, welcoming Lucas, Vitor, Oscar and Stephan to the team. They bring a depth of experience and have made a great start to their career with us.
Plans for growth 🌏
We are yet do anything in the way of organised marketing but despite this are moving towards 50 users either being live or onboarding on the platform, including our first user outside of the UK (Hungary) and potentially one in Australia. It’s been exciting to see box schemes from outside of the UK find us and growth into other regions of the World will be a key focus for us in coming months and years.
We are currently in a phase of what I would term ‘consolidation’, where we are doing a lot of work in areas that really matter but don’t sound or look particularly exciting - maintenance, API upgrades, site performance etc. We’re also focused on making you more autonomous, whether that is onboarding, sending refunds to card (where a credit account exists), dealing with more complex customer issues etc - we need to make what we do more scalable as we welcome more users. We could really do with your help telling others about us by the way, but more on that later. Renee will talk about upcoming priorities in his update just below.
Keep an eye out for a new website and plenty of new support material as we start to focus on how to help our users get the most out of the system.
There’s lots more that I could talk about (some very exciting stuff with The Soil Association, potential engagement with DEFRA, new investment opportunities) but that’s enough from me for now, I’m taking a holiday from next week but will be back at my desk as normal from early September if you’d like to catch up - find me on discord!
Steve
Update from George 👨🏻🌾
Hi! Feeling the pinch of the summer holiday routine upheaval at the moment, which thankfully is countered by having our farm shop busier than normal - having a coffee station and a place to sit for 15 mins means people are making a special effort to come see us. Also good is that we are now on 100% our own veg, which is reducing costs a lot, but the season has been about 6 weeks late this year.
Over the summer I have stepped away from the packing line (we have some summer help at the moment), and I am pleased that the team is innovating and improving without me there!
Last week we hosted the Soil Association press launch of “Organic September” - a chance for journalists to get a feel for the ethos and benefits of growing organically. We did a tour, did some harvesting and had them packing veg boxes using the tablet screens. They all responded very positively to everything and the Soil Association are keen to introduce the story and benefits of Growing Good far and wide, including to DEFRA. It is very clear that so many people can see the platform has the potential to transform the direct selling marketplace. But, it all starts with the core value of making sure there is more money in box scheme’s bank accounts. With a secure financial standing we can continue the good work that we all do for a more sustainable future.
George
Technical update <Renee> 👨🏻💻
Over the past few months, we've been hard at work on a major update to our storefront that is due to be released to you next week. By leveraging the latest capabilities from recent framework releases, including advancements in Server-Side Rendering and Static Site Generation, along with enhanced caching strategies and optimisations, we've been able to significantly boost performance and serve data more efficiently.
These upgrades translate to a faster, more responsive browsing experience. Pages load more quickly, and products and content appear almost instantly, even during peak traffic times.
This update not only enhances performance but also serves as a robust foundation, enabling us to implement more complex logic and features without compromising the store's speed or responsiveness.
This will be the first of many storefront updates planned over the coming months - I will keep you posted. Any Q’s find me on discord!
Renee
User experience [Martin] 👨🏻🏫
Hi all, I hope everyone is having a great Summer so far! There are some of you that I have not spoken to in a while or haven’t spoken to properly since I joined GG, which is more than a year ago now! I am keen to do that and will be reaching out soon to arrange a call when you’re free. If there is anything you need to discuss with me or if you’d like a refresher on anything in the system do let me know.
When I’m not busy helping new users onboard to our platform or running the GG help desk, part of my role at Growing Good is building out documentation that supports our platform. My aim is for our Wiki to form the basis for support with everything you need to know with a mixture of written guides and videos. Our wiki will be on our new website soon, which we are really looking forward to! I’d love us to make more of our community channels on discord and for you to feel more autonomous day to day, but this is unlikely without great documentation - If you have any feedback for me on our Wiki I would love to hear it. You can pop me a message on Discord any time.
Martin
