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Nappies to trophies: The story of award-winning delivery app Wumdrop

The winner of the MTN Business App of the Year 2015, Wumdrop, has been described as the “Uber for deliveries” by some, but the origin of the startup is based on a need the founders saw in the nappy industry.

Wumdrop lets users have anything up to 15 kilograms picked up or delivered to anywhere within the cities it operates in, which at present include Cape Town and Johannesburg. The deliveries are made by people that become Wumdrop Heroes through the startup’s employment drive.

The delivery service was founded by Roy Borole and Simon Hartley in May 2014, when an e-commerce company they were working for hit a bit of a snag.

The company the pair were working for sold nappies by subscription, and the service took off rapidly. This growth posed a problem for the company when its distribution chain began to suffer under the demand.

“We looked at a number of alternatives and realised it just might be easier to do it ourselves”, said Borole speaking to us at Leaderex, “We realised we did a fantastic job and that it would make sense for us to offer this awesome service to more people. At this point we decided to automate the whole process, develop an app and bring more drivers on board.”

There are currently 33 000 registered users using the delivery service, which charges for the delivery of any qualifying package at R12 per kilometre.

Of course, growth is on the cards for Wumdrop who hope to expand the offering to more cities in 2016. “We are also releasing a number of plugins next year for different e-commerce vendors and a more robust architecture for services that are not consumer orientated,” Borole told us while speaking about the Wumdrop enterprise solutions, which the company expects to roll out soon.

With plans to expand the offering outside of Johannesburg and Cape Town to the Eastern Cape and other parts of Africa, Wumdrop is a startup that is already out of nappies and ready to take on the world.

The Innovation Corner at Leaderex was made possible by Microsoft Bizspark.

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