Yuppiechef celebrates 10 years of e-commerce

Andrew Smith

Co-founder Andrew Smith says, “The last ten years have been an exciting ride, but have also taught us many valuable lessons.

“Right from the beginning we knew that we had a tendency to overcomplicate things, but even with this admission of guilt we still insisted on building everything in-house. As a result, the entire business, including our collective effort of over 700,000 hand-written and personal cards to Yuppiechef customers and all of our world-class tech systems, is entirely hand-built in South Africa. This obviously means that Yuppiechef is a proudly South African creation, but it is not the most efficient or cost effective way to scale a business.

“In many respects, the brand is a labour of love that has become one of South Africa’s most loved companies, but the downside of that is that you lose critical control over your own asset and it can constrain your freedom to experiment with it at will. As an example, a few years ago we made slight tweaks to the shade of pink that we use in our visual branding and had a surprising amount of resistance internally to the change. That’s because the Yuppiechef brand is personal - people have taken ownership of it.”

Shane Dryden, also a co-founder of Yuppiechef, reflects on his experience over the past ten years. “In the beginning, I think we assumed that it was going to be a lot easier than what it turned out to be. We wrongly assumed that we could build a substantial business with a limited staff complement. There was one planning document from the early days that estimated that the business, as it grew, could get by with just one full-time marketing specialist, which quickly became a clearly unreasonable expectation. We soon realised that you need to surround yourself with talented and passionate people if you want to create something remarkable.”

Shane also reminisces that the founders used to be quite modest about their achievements and he reveals a certain sense of regret about not being a bit more confident in their earlier approach to doing business.

“We assumed that because we were a small business based in South Africa that certain things on the international stage would be ‘off-limits’ to us. That may just be a mindset, which is pervasive with South African entrepreneurs in general, but it is so not true. It took us a little while to realise that and shake off that mantle,” adds Dryden.

Andrew Smith concludes, “After ten years we look back at our journey and ask, ‘Why did we do it that way?’ The truth is that you cannot plot your success on a timeline and simply pick and choose the events that you think made the most positive contribution. Understanding how magic really works is elusive and perhaps everything that we’ve done in the last decade has had an invaluable impact.”

For more information, go to www.yuppiechef.com.