Pictured: Devan Hughes, Co-founder and CEO of Buymie
Devan Hughes is our Business Person of the Month May 2021, in association with KPMG. Hughes co-founded and launched the same-day grocery delivery company, Buymie, in 2016. It is now expanding its service to over 180,000 people in Limerick and Galway with the creation of 60 new personal shopper roles.
Buymie is a mobile-first grocery platform that offers personalised convenience whereby customers can order from a list of partnering shops and have their goods hand-delivered to their door within an hour. The company’s mission is to bridge the gap between convenience and online shopping. Since its launch, the service has been used by one in 10 Dublin households and is also available in Cork. It has also launched in the UK with the service available to over 250,000 households in Bristol.
The idea behind the platform was to make online and on-demand delivery services an option for retailers of any size. By partnering with Buymie, a retailer can develop a new channel to increase their customer reach, drive additional revenue and connect with their customers in a new way. Most importantly, this can all be done without the heavy upfront capital cost that has traditionally been associated with rolling out a service like this.
The company has raised 10.5 million euro to date and this official launch into Galway and Limerick will bring the service to thousands more whereby customers will be able to shop online for more than 35,000 items from partnering shops Dunnes Stores, Tesco and Lidl. CEO Devan Hughes said of the launch:
We have seen incredible demand for the Buymie same-day grocery delivery in Ireland and Britain, and today’s announcement brings the service to thousands more Irish households. As we see the light at the end of the tunnel we are all going to be making up for lost time, and using a service like Buymie can give customers the option of taking back those two hours spent in the car, aisles and queues.
Business & Finance, Business Person of the Month
