Yuppiechef: from clicks to bricks –

an omnichannel approach for a

South African business
Mignon Reyneke and Claire Barnardo

ndrew Smith, CEO of Yuppiechef, was busy replying to some customer feedback he Mignon Reyneke is

A had received at the expanded office over the road from the headquarters in
Westlake, Cape Town. As he did, he thought about where the business was now in
Associate Professor at
Digital Marketing, Graduate
School of Business, UCT,
April 2019 since going into the physical store retail space (Exhibit 1). The past two years
Cape Town, South Africa.
had been an entirely new journey for the high-end online kitchen and homeware company.
Claire Barnardo is based at
However, 12 years on and four stores later, Yuppiechef was growing steadily. Andrew was Case Writing Center,
still surprised at things: Graduate School of
It’s been a push going into stores as an e-commerce and technology company. We didn’t Business, UCT,
Cape Town, South Africa.
actually have broad and deep competence in choosing locations, designing stores,
merchandising, hiring and training sales assistants and dealing with all the other complexities of
physical retail, he thought.

Since starting in 2006 as an e-commerce company, customer demand for stores, when less
than 2 per cent shop online, had driven Yuppiechef into the next phase of growth. However,
there were still a lot of unknowns, possibly more now. Being a “clicks to bricks” pioneer felt
a lot more risky than being the e-commerce pioneer did back then. In addition, just because
Yuppiechef had been successful in one channel, would it necessarily translate into another?
He wanted to add more value to the customer journey. This would complete the purchasing
cycle well. The overarching question remained:
“How do we retain our customer-centricity in a completely new channel?” he questioned.
At that moment, Laura Hofmeyr, Executive Assistant, popped by to offer him another flat
white. He smiled and accepted while dialling the number for his interview on the business.

1. Online first
The resounding success of the high-end online kitchen and homeware company was not an
overnight success, but it was in the making for five years. When the company was founded
in 2006 by Smith and his friend Shane Dryden, it stocked 32 products, all from the same
brand, and operated from the living room of Smith’s Plumstead home in Cape Town. Eight
sales in the first six months seemed a slow start and it took a year to gain the first 200 Disclaimer. This case is written
solely for educational purposes
customers. It had been 12 years since the company shipped its first order and now and is not intended to represent
Yuppiechef was a veteran in the South African online retail market and one of the lauded successful or unsuccessful
managerial decision-making.
success stories. Having earned six consecutive “best e-commerce store of the year” The authors may have
disguised names; financial and
awards and 99 per cent positive customer feedback (Exhibit 2), the assumption was that other recognisable information
Yuppiechef has mastered the art of online retailing. to protect confidentiality.

DOI 10.1108/EEMCS-05-2019-0107 VOL. 9 NO. 3 2019, pp. 1-17, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 2045-0621 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j PAGE 1
 However, in the past 24 months, Yuppiechef took an unexpected strategic decision to open
brick-and-mortar stores challenging the more traditional strategic path for most retailers
(bricks-to-clicks) and embarking on the road less travelled: clicks-to-bricks. Serving a niche
market of foodies online with high-end kitchen ware and accessories in an emerging market
where the uptake of online shopping was initially very slow (mostly due to safety concerns)
was not an easy feat. Growing from the initial 32 products from one brand to 8700 products
from over 700 of the world’s leading brands (such as Nespresso, Le Creuset and Jamie
Oliver), Yuppiechef surpassed all projected growth figures and recorded 300 per cent year-
on-year revenue growth by 2011 and built an almost cult-like following. The move into brick-
and mortar stores was showing some success but it came with a new set of business
challenges. How would the company maintain the irreproachable customer service that it is
so well known for?

2. The customer focus

Smith and Dryden recognised the potential of the online shopping market in South Africa
while still in its fledgling stage. Despite more established retailers such as Price, Woolworths
and @Home not yet investing heavily in online channels, and the uptake of online shopping
being slow, Smith and Dryden knew that this opportunity was worth exploring. At the time,
Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay were becoming increasingly popular on TV channels
followed shortly after by the sensational success of MasterChef turning ordinary people into
eager ‘foodies’. Consumers were looking for kitchen accessories to support the home-
cooking trend and Yuppiechef offered just that.
In 2008, Paul Galatsis joined the Yuppiechef team as a partner and director. While Dryden
had a great love for food and inspiring vision, Smith had technical and strategic skills.
Galatsis brought marketing and creative skills to the team which were becoming more
important as the company was starting to grow. Having seen unprecedented growth by
2011, with a staff contingent of only 16, the partners decided to add to the team as Dryden
reflected:
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 fairly limited staff
compliment. 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[1].

Dryden and Smith believed in an ethos of customer service from the first shipment of a
Yuppiechef product and through mastering the art of customer service, the company built a
brand with a loyal following. The founders believe that the company was “a customer
service company that happens to sell kitchen tools” which has afforded the brand a stellar
record of positive feedback (99 per cent) on customer service watchdog Hellopeter.com
and 60 per cent of purchases from Yuppiechef were from returning customers. Brand fans
had even created a Pinterest page where customers submit photos of their pets posing in
Yuppiechef packaging. Their passion for customer service was further evident through their
practice of sending a hand-written thank you card that went out to every customer with
every purchase. As the company grew significantly, a larger staff contingent was useful as
staff members would block off time every week to write the personalised thank you cards.

3. Emerging concerns
Online safety concerns and lack of access to data in a large part of the South African
market resulted in the uptake of online shopping being slow at first. A study conducted by
World Wide Worx (Online Retail in South Africa 2019) with the support of Visa and Platinum
Seed however indicated that online shopping was on the rise. The online shopping figure of

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2018 showed a 25 per cent growth over that of 2017 which surpassed all expectations and
projections. This positive growth was likely fuelled by the uptake of new shopping channels
like mobile shopping and Instagram, as well as significant investments by online retailers to
enhance their digital presence and traditional retailers investing heavily in their online
capabilities coupled with aggressive marketing campaigns.
While online retail still made up a relatively small portion of overall retail sales at 1.4 per cent
of the approximately R1tn spent in traditional retail stores, it was estimated that online sales
should reach the 2 per cent mark by 2022[2].
As the online shopping business was maturing in the South African market, apparel still
remained the largest category sold online, with home and gourmet food products coming in
third. The positive growth figures in online retail and significant investment in digital
offerings by online and traditional retailers alike has led to an equally significant number of
competitors in the online shopping space.

4. Going into stores

It still made Andrew smile when he thought about the moment they decided to take the step
into building physical stores. In early 2017, he was having coffee with his friend and co-
founder Shane Dryden and debating for the hundredth time whether or not to open physical
stores. The time felt right and so they opened their diaries and wrote, “Store Launch Party:
28 June 2017”:
There comes a point when putting a marker in the ground and working towards it is what gets
things done. There were still so many unknowns, but once we had made the decision to go
ahead, we could tick them off. We started contacting the malls, seeking out experts, assessing
service providers – not in order to make the decision, but with the decision having been made,”
relayed Andrew to the journalist. “One of the things we learnt was that you don’t get to decide
exactly when a store location will become available! Our Willowbridge store opened on 1
October 2017.”

5. The reality
However, the 24 months of opening multiple stores around South Africa was challenging. It
was incredibly hard work, with curveballs, deadlines and the constraints of dealing in the
physical world. Despite all of that, the business underestimated how many good people and
companies existed in the retail industry to support them – designers, shopfitters, lighting
experts, and experienced store managers and sales assistants. This was a lesson in itself:
For more than a decade we have built an e-commerce company with incredibly sparse access
to the skills and resources we needed. From digital marketing, to creating a better checkout
process, to sourcing packaging for our orders, we felt like we were in the Wild West, solving
problems in the South African context for the first time. Our challenge is to make use of the
industry’s retail resources, coupled with our brand and online capabilities, to create something
really special, Andrew explained further.

Yuppiechef had the opportunity to pioneer as an omnichannel business or in “future retail”,

which they opted to do. Andrew aimed to make the experience seamless and similar for the
customer across the two difference channels.

6. Clicks and bricks

In South Africa, physical retail was still dominant, particularly in the major shopping malls,
for brands with unique offerings. Andrew attributed most of Yuppiechef’s ability for success
to the fundamentals of retail. Retailers around the world were struggling due to e-commerce
disruption and the impact was mostly felt in the marginal stores in the marginal malls:

VOL. 9 NO. 3 2019 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j PAGE 3

 South Africa has one of the highest mall-to-population ratios in the world, and most of the big
retail chains have an outlet in almost all of those malls. That was probably unsustainable, and the
double-header of a weaker economy and online threat has done enough to squeeze the bottom-
performing stores and chains. There are always cycles in retail, and we were fortunate to be
starting our physical store builds in a trough, where we can prudently pick the best locations and
not be over-supplied, Andrew explained.

Even so, Yuppiechef sought to create the best store experience aligned with excellent
products:
We are obviously trying to create a great store experience. The unlimited shelf-space of
e-commerce has allowed us to grow a large range, which we can now cherry-pick from for our
stores, using rich customer data. We have a strong technology base that we have been able to
build on top of, so that our online/offline integration is seamless and modern, he said.

7. Marketing at yuppiechef
Handwritten cards were only one of the reasons Yuppiechef customers were so delighted
with the brand. The founders consistently worked at building the brand and a sense of
community around Yuppiechef. Early on, they carefully chose a number of social media
channels to engage customers and build the community through their content marketing
strategy. The success of this engagement was evident in their more than 76,000 Instagram
followers, 150,000 Facebook likes and over 26,000 Twitter followers.
Facebook was used as the main platforms of engagement where they shared visual
content of tasty dishes and treats to inspire customers to purchase products and to share
the content. Twitter was used to converse with customers, answer questions, and thank
customers in the casual conversational style that Yuppiechef had become known for.
Instagram was used to provide a behind-the-scenes look at Yuppiechef where staff
experimented with kitchen equipment and dishes and shared pictures of the outcome.
The company had an in-house photography team to ensure the creation of only high-
quality food photography and pictorial content. Video content was a carefully compiled
collection of both in-house staff-generated videos (which included fun clips such as
“kettle boiler races”) and clips created by users experimenting with Yuppiechef
products. The Yuppiechef website was a further opportunity to engage with customers –
the site had a live chat box where consumers could ask questions and get quick
feedback and to interact with the brand, enhancing brand trust and humanising the e-
commerce experience.
Yuppiechef also had its own online magazine Spatula. The magazine shared exquisite food
photography, recipes from its own test kitchen, easy-to-read articles, food trends, and
information on places that offered cooking classes to further build and encourage activity in
the foodie community. A newsletter was also published every month, providing a sneak
peak of the latest Spatula issue, information on new products and monthly specials, and
encouraging readers to visit the website.

8. The omnichannel experience

Starting Yuppiechef as an online business allowed founders Andrew and Shane to start a
business with very little stock, no staff and very low rental costs. They figured it out as they
went along and learnt what it meant to run an online business that provided world-class
service. Traditional retail was not an option in the first few years, mainly due to high costs of
a retail store, but also since the projections for traditional retail were bleak at the time.
However, targeting a niche high-income market often meant that many of the potential
customers were older and perhaps less likely to shop online, which limited Yuppiechef’s

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reach in a relatively small market. The founders reflected on their decision to open
traditional retail stores:
We still love selling online – the huge range we can offer, delivery to every corner of the country,
and 24/7 convenience. For a long time we believed that e-commerce was the future of retail and
that eventually this channel would “win” and the others would “die”. We were wrong. We want to
reach as many people as we can, because we believe that quality kitchen tools and ingredients
can change the way you feel about being in the kitchen and help you be a better cook. That’s
why we’re opening retail stores[3].

The Yuppiechef team believed that the omnichannel strategy would bring more value to
their customers in that they could browse products online and come into the store to make
their final purchase decision. Alternatively, the customer could go in-store and experience
the products and then purchase it online and have it conveniently delivered to their door
without having to carry the products around a shopping mall. A further benefit was that all
products in-store had QR codes so that customers could scan with their mobile phones to
access user video’s and product reviews to assist with their decision (Exhibit 3).
The development of the first retail store was done in collaboration with renowned interior
design firm ARRCC, which assisted the Yuppiechef team in choosing finishes and
developing a unique style for the first store that opened in Cape Town. Since the opening of
this first store, the entire design capability has moved in-house, where large technological
advances were made to the design process and the customer experience in-store:
Our team has successfully created 3D models of our stores. These help us plan ancillary store
items like stock depth, budgets, marketing plans and replenishment stock flow. What’s more,
we’ve built fully immerse virtual reality (VR) models of our stores that anyone in our team can use
to get a feel for and test store layouts long before they’re actually built,[4] Andrew explained
excitedly.

As part of the pioneering technological store design, Yuppiechef developed its own point of
sale software (POS) (Exhibit 4) that was the same system they used for online sales. Since
customer service was key to the brand, the company wanted to be able to serve their
customers anywhere in the store with no queues or waiting time. This meant that all staff in-
store had a mobile POS device allowing them to assist customers with payments in various
forms, check stock availability in real-time, process returns, and order products that might
not be in the store in an effort to deliver the world’s best shopping experience to their
customers (Exhibit 5).

9. Conclusion
As Andrew finished the conversation on his smartphone, he went back to the beginning of
Yuppiechef again. He remembered that the company’s positioning was a customer-centric
business that believed in the brands and the products that they sold. While this position was
still one that he, Shane and the team firmly believed in, Andrew wondered how he could
maintain this ethos with the added challenges of a brick-and-mortar business:
We have built a strong culture of care and excellence, which is a key part of our success when it
cascades down to customer interactions. We have reinforced our culture through daily
interactions in our head office. As we now spread out around the country, our challenge is to
continue to strengthen our culture without the luxury of being able to be in the same room at the
same time. We have to create communication and training systems to replace the organic
versions that have existed since we were two guys in a lounge. We cannot stay the same as we
were, and a nostalgia for the past makes change difficult, he noted.

However, traditional retail stores were challenging to value as equally important to online –
particularly when online was still bigger than their stores. He knew that they still had a long
way to go with the stores. The online checkout processes needed to be tweaked and

VOL. 9 NO. 3 2019 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j PAGE 5

 perfected so that customers got the same experience each time. The physical stores
required more work to create consistency regardless of who was serving the customer.
While the company strived to ensure a superior customer experience in-store with state-of-
the-art technology, knowledgeable staff and beautiful store design, Andrew wondered if this
Keywords:
Marketing, Strategy, was enough to maintain the superior customer service, both online and in-store, that the
Customer service, Yuppiechef brand was built on. How could they maintain the original culture and grow as
Customer loyalty the ominchannel pioneer they were becoming?

Notes
1. www.skillsportal.co.za/content/yuppiechef-reflects-10-years-business
2. www.iol.co.za/business-report/economy/online-shopping-hits-r14bn-mark-in-sa-17759126
3. www.yuppiechef.com/stores.htm
4. www.yuppiechef.com/stores.htm

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Exhibit 1. Yuppiechef retail store

Plate E1

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 Exhibit 2. Customer feedback: online

Figure E1

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Exhibit 3. Products with QR codes

Plate E2

VOL. 9 NO. 3 2019 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j PAGE 9

 Exhibit 4. Point of sale device

Plate E3

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Exhibit 5. Customer feedback: retail

Figure E2

About the authors

Mignon Reyneke is an Associate Professor of Digital Marketing at the UCT Graduate School
of Business. She consults and researches the field of Marketing Strategy and Digital
Marketing and teaches in these areas to MBA students and executive education delegates.
Mignon Reyneke is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: mignon.reyneke@
gsb.uct.ac.za

Claire Barnardo is the Case Writing Centre Manager at the UCT Graduate School of
Business. She is an Editor and Journalist by trade, and a case writer in the making. Claire is
passionate about writing and championing African and emerging market business teaching
cases.

VOL. 9 NO. 3 2019 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j PAGE 11