While many ultra-fast delivery companies flood consumers with cross-category offerings from Skittles to Skims, Zé Delivery is proving that less could be more.

The Anheuser-Busch InBev-owned DTC service says it is Latin America’s largest alcohol and bev delivery platform, bringing ice-cold packs of its brands—like Budweiser and Brahma—to consumers’ doors in 30 minutes or less.

• It was born out of the beer giant’s venture arm, ZX Ventures, in 2016, back before the boom in alcohol and grocery delivery, noted Guilherme Lebelson, AB InBev’s global VP of direct-to-consumer.

With beverage delivery “difficult to execute” because products are heavy and bulky, he noted, and low margins to ship (especially cold), it looked for a solution.

“We thought that we needed to somehow spearhead and push and try to do things that perhaps other retailers would take longer to do,” Lebelson told Retail Brew.

Bottled up

AB InBev fine-tuned Zé Delivery in Brazil until 2019, when the biz really picked up and it reached 1.6 million orders. Then the pandemic, of course, gave its business a boost. In 2021, it brought in 5 million orders monthly, and 61 million in total, Lebelson said. It was then that the company knew it was time to expand.

• Zé Delivery is now in 300 Brazilian cities, and reaches 50+ million people in 10 more countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico.

“Because this is no longer an experiment, we’re seeing that we can do this in a profitable way, to have this direct relationship with consumers, understand their needs, have the data on what they prefer, so we can optimize and iterate all the time,” Lebelson said.

• AB InBev’s DTC e-comm platforms notched 62% revenue growth, reaching ~$500 million last year, though the company wouldn’t share financial figures for Zé Delivery.

Lebelson admitted AB InBev was initially “afraid” Zé Delivery wouldn’t be able to compete with multicategory retailers like Amazon. However, while several rapid-delivery companies have seen losses in recent months, Zé’s bev focus has been a driver of its success.

“The big realization was, this is a problem that nobody else is solving the way consumers want it to be solved,” Lebelson said.

Click here to read more.—EC

Yesterday, we wrote about how growing a beard went from being perceived as a rejection of grooming to a grooming bonanza. Today, we’re sagely stroking our beards and pondering what could be next for the category. Because even if many pandemic beardsmen shave before they return to offices, the brands catering to them could still grow.

Facing the future

Beardbrand, for example, offers non-beard products, including deodorant, hair products, and fragrance. Eric Bandholz, the founder of the brand, said that when customers grow fond of the fragrance of a beard product, they’re encouraged to also add non-beard products with the same scent to their orders.

“We leaned into this concept called ‘scent confusion,’ where you’re using different products from different brands and you end up having a lot of conflicting fragrances,” he told Retail Brew. “We wanted to unify that experience for our customers.”

• Beardbrand stopped selling on Amazon several years ago, Bandholz explained, because on the brand’s DTC site, customers are much more likely to buy more of these products.

Other brands are offering new products for dedicated beard primpers, like heated beard-straightening brushes, which boomed during the pandemic.

Comb improvement: Beards, of course, are just hair that’s below the ears, and Matthew Biggins, SVP and GM of the grooming division at personal-care giant Edgewell, said that when it comes to the future of the beard category, he looks scalp-ward.

“The way the category’s evolving is kind of following that path of hair, which is getting into more solution-based platforms,” Biggins explained. In other words, beard brands might have launched with a single beard and conditioner, whereas in the future they could have a broad range, like Pantene does for hair.

Click here to read more.—AAN

A convo with Morning Brew cofounder Alex Lieberman, an interactive case-study review, and an open discussion about workplace innovation with a group of your peers. You’ll get all this at the free Morning Brew Accelerator (MB/A) Innovation Workshop happening on April 20 from 7–8:30pm ET.

In this 90-minute, hands-on event, you’ll:

• Get introduced to innovation frameworks.
• Discuss the common pitfalls of innovation.
• Learn how to lead innovation in your own role.

And that’s just a taste of what you’d learn in the 8-week MB/A course!

Register now while spots are still available.

When the pandemic hit, office-furniture startup Branch saw its revenue drop to nearly zero overnight after offices shuttered. This week, the company announced a $10 million Series A funding round, led by Springdale Ventures.

What drove Branch’s revival, according to CEO and co-founder Gregory Hayes, was shifting from selling strictly B2B to a hybrid DTC and enterprise model.

• In the six weeks that spanned its pandemic pivot, Branch negotiated shipping contracts with UPS and FedEx and retrained its warehouse, marketing, and sales staff to cater to a consumer-facing business.

Grow on up: After this change in direction, Branch’s inventory—which includes office chairs (starting at $250) and workstations ($500 and up)—sold out in a month, Hayes told Retail Brew.

The demand has kept up, with revenues now in the eight figures (Branch declined to provide specific numbers), from $800,000 in 2019. DTC now makes up 80% of the company’s biz—though B2B is picking up as offices reopen, Hayes noted—and it expects to hit 100,000 customers in a matter of days.

“If you look back prior to the pandemic, it would have been less than 100 customers,” Hayes said.

Looking ahead…Branch hopes to reach 200,000 customers this year and will use the fresh funds to accelerate hiring and build out its tech.

• This includes an app to help consumers set up their furniture. “This is very much like Headspace for ergonomics,” Hayes explained.

Brick and mortar is also on the agenda, he said. Branch hopes to roll out showrooms across the country, starting with New York and Los Angeles, over the next 18 months.—JS

Today’s top retail reads.

Hush, hush: Steering clear of politics has helped Uniqlo to become one of China’s most popular apparel brands. (Bloomberg)

Border battle: Texas’s truck-inspection policy is under heavy scrutiny, as opponents say it is slowing down the flow of goods from Mexico. (The Washington Post)

Keep it kosher: Keeping kosher dates back thousands of years, and the certification is one of the most popular in the food industry. (Food Dive)

The big number you need to know.

Restaurants are back in a big way, with 95% of respondents in a recent survey eating out in the previous three months, according to The Dining Dilemma report by Epsilon. The survey, conducted between October to November 2021, found that a whopping 73% of people dined inside a restaurant, and 71% of respondents picked up a meal.

• 49% ordered from a restaurant because they could do so through its app or website, and 41% ordered a meal because the restaurant was close by.
• About a third (32%) opted for third-party delivery apps like Grubhub or DoorDash.

Bargain hunter: Everyone loves a good deal. More than two-thirds (65%) of those surveyed said they would consider ordering from a restaurant that had a special offer or could give them a discount.—JS

Catch up on the Retail Brew stories you may have missed.

• Misfits Market debuts its first private-label line, Odds & Ends
• Why brick-and-mortar retail should consider moving into mixed-use developments
• Goodbye, minimalism: How Gen Z is reshaping retail product design