This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovich from Bloomberg Radio. For next guest gets e commerce big time. He's a co founder of jet dot com. It was then sold to Walmart for
three point three billion back in twos sixteen. Earlier this year, though, Nate Fast debut a delivery service called all of that consolidates orders from fashion label So let's find out a little bit more because he's working with the likes of Michael Core's, Adidas Sacks and a lot of other very well known brands. Here with how it all works, how It's going. Is Nate Fast, founder of Olive, on the phone in New York City. Nate, how are you, Carol? How are you? I'm doing okay, Uh, feeling like the
world's getting back to normal, which is always a good thing. Um, tell me what your last year has been like, especially here you are launching a company amid the midst of the pandemic and a very different economic and market environment. No, absolutely, Um. You know, we started all of a little over a year ago, in fact, just about a year ago coming up next week. And when we initially started exploring it
It wasn't triggered by the triggered by the pandemic. It was triggered by just a broader desire to do something
with a social environmental impact for my next adventure. And with COVID and the increase in how much people are shopping online and the number of deliveries that people are experiencing, I think the pain points and the obvious environmental impact of just the sheer amount of deliveries that we're getting, and not just in the packaging, but just the sheer number of delivery trucks that are stopping at each of our each of our houses, which I'll say that's probably
the most eye opening thing over the last year, looking out my my front window and every single day seeing two, three, four, sometimes more delivery trucks stop at my home. Yeah, listen, I think about it when we're ordering Amazon and it's like, how are you about kind of putting this all into one order? And I'm like, yes, I can wait a couple of days to get something. Tell me though, how Olive works, Nate. Sure, So you sign up donland our app or on our site at shop olive dot com.
It's a free service to consumers when you sign up, we create for you what we call your Olive address, and that's sort of your personal storage space at one of our consolidation centers, which we have two of them, one on the East coast, one on the one on
the West coast. And then when you shop with with Olive at any of the hundred or so retailers that we have affiliate relationships with, when you're going through the checkout process, either on desktop with the help of our Chrome extension or on an iPhone through our our app, we help you in cert that all of address at checkout, and then the retailers pickpack, and ship those orders like
they normally would. They shipped to our consolidation centers. We hold on to them for a couple of days until it's time for what we call your Olive day, which is the one day, or in the case of New York City, you have two days per week that all of your orders come together delivered in one single, reusable, secure, two way, two way shipper. And there's one thing to call out there. You're very transparently at this initial outset,
we're not eliminating the box from the source. The retailers are still picking and packing into the boxes shipping them to us. But we are getting what, in the long run is actually the bigger environmental impact, which is the consolidation of multiple deliveries into a single delivery, which we're getting about it what we call our sort of consolidations about consolidation factor in terms of delivering more to a consumers store step than would have previously been delivered in
the in the status quo. You know, I like to understand the impact, especially since you're concerned about the environment sustainability that by using your service, How do we cut down on our carbon footprint by all of the you know, e commerce that we're doing and all the delivery that
goes along with that. Yeah, No, absolutely so. When you look at the carbon footprint of the sort of post purchase e commerce supply chain, which is the piece that we're focused on, you know, the biggest chunk of that, somewhere in the range comes from that sort of proverbial last mile of the truck stopping at consumers homes, and the remaining half, you know, is split roughly evenly between packaging and then what's called sort of the first and
middle mile of getting that thing from the fulfillment center or store that it's coming from to the to the point of the final last mile delivery. And what we're tackling initially through this this concept of consolidation is that largest chunk, which is the which is the last mile delivery. And I know, as you pointed out, obviously those things are being delivered to us, but they're being delivered in bulk.
So we get one delivery per day from each of FedEx and UPS and other potential carriers at each of our facilities with all of the all of the various orders, and then when we deliver them two consumers, we're getting on average about one point to five shipment into every delivery that that we make, So that would be roughly a reduction on that sort of last mile for those packages to that consumers home. But obviously two pieces there.
One it's it's apparel only for right now, and so there's lots of things that you can't purchase through affiliated retailers through with with Olive, and that will enable a much greater impact in the in the long term as
we're able to service broader sets of categories. And then two, as I mentioned before, we're not eliminating the packaging from the source, but we're actually in the midst right now of working with our our very first retailer to actually integrate directly with their supply chain where we would provide the packaging in their fulfillment centers so that they pick and pack their orders into that from the from the source.
And that will be the goal over time two as volume supports it with each of the retailers on the platform to do that more direct integration, to eliminate the packaging right so, in other words, to help them to kind of be better when it comes to their environmental impact, because I'm right, Is that fair? Totally? Yeah, I'm from a customer experience perspective, because there's other benefits that come from the olive delivery experience, especially from the consumer side
of things. Not only they not have to deal with the hassle of managing the waste from the delivery if they have any returns, they just put it straight back in the packaging, leave it on their doorstep and we pick it up. That's really interesting. Well, and you know part of your value is also going to be in or at least part of your attraction I guess I should say, is the retailers on your site and there's a bunch that are certainly you know in my wheelhouse,
rag and bone, there's aloe. Uh, there's a lot of them, uh anthropology. So you're definitely catching my attention here. Um, how quickly are you signing up a lot more retailers? How easy is that to do? Sure? So we've we've had a ton of outreach following our launch. Uh, you know, around six weeks ago or so is our sort of unveiling of the service to the to the public. So we have a sort of backlog of of of retailers
that we've signed up as affiliate partners. That's probably more than what's already on the site from the from the retailer side of things, we make it very low effort, so it's easy to come on to the come onto the platform, but there is some configuration on our side to make sure that that whole all of address things that we were talking about before, that that assisted entry process for for customers is working late before we turned them live on the platform. What's the trick case part
of what you're doing? Because I think one of the things that I'm thinking about is what I love about e commerce, and I definitely guide myself to places that are easy, that make the whole process for me easy if I need to return it. I like it when there's a brick and mortar that I have that flexibility. Um, what is it that you think you've got to make sure you're doing to really attract a lot of customers? I mean, how many customers right now do you have
on your site? So like, I mean, we we only launched six so sorry, we have several thousand folks who have signed up, but daily order volume is still still quite modest. As we've not we've not really been turned on on marketing yet either. Okay, fair enough. So what do you think though, that you have to make sure makes sense? So consumers kind of get it and it's easy because you know, anything that makes it more difficult,
people are going to find another option. No, absolutely, Um, you know are what we're focused on right now is really consumers understanding what this all of address is and how it enables the service because it is something that's different from a traditional check out process. So we're working on things to make it even easier and more transparent to the customer around how the how the ALI experience works.
And we've gotten tons of great feedback in our first month or so post launched on how to how to do just that for consumers, really really cool stuff, and I hope you'll come back and kind of give us updates on how things are going. I've got to ask you, though, I'd be amiss by not reaching out to you. Just got about a minute or so left here. Uh, it feels like e commerce, Nate just exploded over the past year.
What stands out for you over this these past twelve months and who do you think really just hit it out of the park And again, just got about a minute or so a little bit less. Yeah, I mean not to not to tout my former employer, but I think Walmart did a phenomenal job, especially leveraging their their their footprint of stores, and their fresh grocery offering with the simultaneous launch of the Walmart Plus offering, which I've
signed up for myself as well. And I think it's a great service, all right, Good to good to know, Good to know. Hey, listen, do come back and let us know how things are going, especially as we get into the later months of the year. I love to get an update. Nate Fast, founder of Olive, co founder of Jet dot com which he was just talking about Walmart, and of course that was sold to Walmart back in two sixteen.