BLOCK71 Singapore Entrepreneur Feature — Park N Parcel
In this week’s Entrepreneur Feature, we speak to Erik Cheong, one of the co-founders of Park N Parcel, a start-up whose mission is to create a hassle-free parcel collection experience for online shoppers through a sharing community of neighbours.
- What is Park N Parcel and how did the idea come about?
Park N Parcel is a last mile logistic start-up that leverages on the sharing economy to turn unused residential and commercial space into collection points to allow online shoppers to self pick up their online purchases at their own convenience.
This is a personal pain point — I like to shop online however, when it comes to parcel collection, it’s always a hassle because no one is at home to pick up the parcel. Then I realise that my girlfriend who shop online more frequently than I do doesn’t have experience the same problem. She redirects her online purchases to a nearby aunty house. This aunty stays at home and is a housewife. So this sparked an idea — what if everyone has an aunty or a convenience to help them collect their online purchase on behalf so that they can collect when they are free.
2. What is Park N Parcel’s secret sauce?
Our secret sauce is leveraging on the sharing economy — on focusing on building a community of collection points with residential points such as homes of retirees and housewives and on the commercial side, working with convenient stores and cafes, to bring footfall into their shops to promote their own offerings.
3. What was Park N Parcel’s greatest challenge?
The challenges that many start-ups faces are limited resources, such as time and funding. As a start-up you have a team thats very lean and needs to pick up multiple roles and at the same time, you have to be very nimble on how you spend and on which areas such as marketing.
4. What is your best memory at BLOCK71?
It definitely will be my first day at Founder’s Breakfast where I got to meet other co-founders from different start-ups in the Launchpad area. The start-up founders actually share with us what are the challenges the founders face previously and this provides us with an advantage with the knowledge of dos and don’ts. Within this safe space, they are very open in terms of sharing their contacts and experience and even open to collaborations as well. This, to me, is a key difference between start-ups and corporates.
5. What’s next for Park N Parcel?
We just raised our seed round and we are expanding to overseas markets — Korea, Japan and Thailand. The immediate action will be to launch in Thailand. We just came back from a trip to Bangkok with IE Singapore to do some basic due diligence and research about the market as well. Right now, we are looking for partners in Thailand to expand over there.
If you are in the space of Logistics , Retail Chain & E-commerce, do reach out to Park N Parcel at support@parknparcel.com.sg or curious about what we do, visit their website at www.parknparcel.com.sg.
Watch the full video interview with Erik from Park N Parcel here:
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If you are inspired by this story and have a start-up idea of your own, you can also apply to join the BLOCK71 ecosystem at http://bit.ly/BLOCK71SGApply !
