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Meet the Ecopreneur:
Q: How did the idea for HIVED
come about?
A: Mathias and I saw the rise in
e-commerce, and with that, there was a tangible rise in delivery vans on the roads in London. We realized delivery diesel vans are bad for the environment, so we asked ourselves: Was there a way that we could help transition these parcel delivery companies to use electric vehicles?
We initially decided to display advertising on these delivery vehicles. We thought, “This would be a great way to provide a bit of extra income for these delivery companies, so they can transition their vehicles to electric vehicles.” But they never did. We had GPS tracking inside all kinds of vans from the big delivery companies because we needed that information for advertising and data reasons. And what we realized is that how these big companies were delivering parcels on a day-to-day basis was really inefficient. We spoke to the van drivers day in and day out and realized the challenges of their jobs and the difficulties they face. And then we realized: We’re not an advertising business. We need to disrupt parcel delivery.
That was the seed planted. From that spark and pivot moment in early 2020, we built the technology, spoke to customers, and built out a minimum viable product.
After spending time in London attending King’s College during the rise of
e-commerce, the pair noticed diesel delivery vehicles, which cram the city’s roads, produced an alarming amount
of pollution. They dug into the data and found that these emissions weren’t just causing a huge health crisis, resulting in
up to 40,000 premature deaths per year
in the U.K., but were also unnecessarily contributing to global warming. At 24
and 25 years old, respectively, Iqbal and Krieger set out to take on the biggest challenge of our time—disrupting the well-established, and slow to adapt, parcel industry and creating the first mass-market zero-emissions delivery fleet in the world.
Driven by a data-rich platform, people-first attitude, and a fleet of electric vans, cargo bikes, and electric mopeds, Iqbal and Krieger are transforming the way companies across London deliver parcels and are lowering emissions in the city—and they are just getting started. To learn more about Iqbal’s journey as an Ecopreneur, we sat down with her at HIVED headquarters (HQ) in London.
Q: What were some of the challenges you faced in the company’s early days?
A: Those early days were just really long and tiring. But now I look back, and I think those were actually the best days. We would be on our laptops, starting at 7:00 a.m., all day, coding, building the tech-nology, speaking to our customers, and then actually doing deliveries. Sometimes, I’d be on my bicycle with my laptop in my backpack, picking up parcels from our customers, doing a delivery, and just hopping off my bike for one second to reply to some emails.
Figuring out how to build trust within the industry was actually the most difficult part. I think people looked at us and thought, “You two are disrupting parcel delivery? Good luck.”
Q: Are businesses feeling pressure to decarbonize their deliveries? Where’s that pressure coming from?
A: They are feeling the pressure from the top. They’re given strict key performance indicators (KPIs) to reduce their carbon emissions, but they don’t know how to do it. The majority of emissions come from the supply chain. If you’re a head of sustainability at those companies, you’re like, “Well, who out there is building a parcel delivery network with zero emissions that can help us cut our emissions entirely?” So, businesses choose HIVED because it’s 100% emission-free, affordable, and better.
But we know that for retailers to adopt and to use our delivery service at mass market scale, they’re not going to pay a premium for green deliveries. So, we embed that into everything that we do. We charge them per parcel delivered. The business model in that sense is not different. We don’t want to disrupt that side of the business or change too much from what our core customers are used to. But what we do from there on is totally different.
Because we’re transitioning more and more of these retailers from their traditional, polluting ways of delivering parcels, they are becoming entirely emission-free. If e-commerce and parcel deliveries double in the next 10 years, as they are expected to, we can make a huge impact.
Q: How does SeaTrees leverage the power of business and brand partnerships to accelerate change?
Q: You’ve worked with many consumer product brands to look at the impacts of their products. How have you noticed companies shifting their approach to sustainability?
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Murvah Iqbal of HIVED
This zero-emission delivery company is transforming the outdated industry one parcel at a time.
As a child, Murvah Iqbal looked forward to sitting around the dinner table at her home in Manchester, England, listening to her father and uncles talk about growing their independent business. It was those early conversations that sparked her entrepreneurial drive, which would eventually lead her to co-found London-based zero-emission parcel delivery company HIVED alongside her friend and business partner Mathias Krieger.
27%
of the u.k.’s total
emissions come from the
transport sector
Eco•pre•neur: an environmentally minded entrepreneur who leads and drives climate action worldwide
Listen to Hampus Jakobsson
on climate as table stakes.
Q: Why do you think it’s important to prioritize customer service?
A: It’s the most important thing. Mathias and I still take some customer calls because we want to be in touch with them. We need to make sure they’re happy. We have a 100% customer retention rate. We instill the value of quality customer service in every member of our team. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business.
Q: How were you able to achieve a 100% customer retention rate?
A: With communication, honesty, trust, and transparency. When’s there’s a problem, we acknowledge the customer and talk them through what is happening. We give them clear milestones for when they’re going to be updated. There’s nothing more frustrating than being left in the dark. I look at my own customer experience: When do I feel frustrated? How can I take those learnings and make sure that we don’t do the same at HIVED?
Q: What are the driving forces behind HIVED’s success?
A: The team. That’s our delivery drivers. That’s our warehouse team. That’s our HQ team. That’s absolutely everyone who touches HIVED. They are the beating heart of HIVED, and everything that we accomplish is because of them.
Q: Why is company culture a priority
for you?
A: The best people in the world work for HIVED. People from all different walks of life and all different circumstances blend to create the HIVED culture, which is incredible.
Look at our drivers: They are so crucial to the success of our business because they are the ones delivering the parcels every day. They are the physical touch point for us, and if we treat them right, and if we show them career progression, and open those doors for them, they feel appreciated. They feel that gratitude.
It’s important for us to build a supportive culture at HIVED because if we treat our employees well, they treat our customers well, and they deliver parcels well.
of hived’s london fleet is emission-free
100%
Q: Why is employing your drivers full-time a good
business decision?
A: It’s incredibly good business. People always think, “Oh. Well, the competitors are paying less for their delivery drivers. You’re paying more for your delivery drivers.” However, what they’re not understanding is our delivery drivers appreciate that we’re paying more. They provide an excellent service. You can look at our Trustpilot [consumer review website]. They’re all five-star reviews. When they provide a good service, our retail customers are happy, so we keep them for longer.
Q: What made you want to be an Ecopreneur?
A: I always had this spark of entrepreneurialism. My dad didn’t go to college, but he did start a successful business. I could see that hustle, and around the dinner table, the conversation revolved around business. My uncles are in a similar position. I don’t think many of them went to university, but they’ve created one of the fastest growing independent food chains in the U.K. Having that exposure at an early age embedded that, okay, this is exciting. And for me, those conversations at home around the dinner table were sometimes more exciting than the conversations I was having with my teachers at school.
Q: What advice do you have for aspiring ecopreneurs?
A: There is a lot of hard work and long hours, and you have to be willing to make sacrifices. We’re trying to solve probably the most complex problem in our industry, and that inspires me. That motivates me. Day in and day out, I’m being challenged. If that inspires you too, then I would say: Start yesterday.
Read More
RIPE FOR DISRUPTION: Why parcel delivery needs innovation to reach
net-zero.
Read More
EXPLAINER: See why a carbon-free parcel delivery network is necessary for tackling climate change.
Read More
BEHIND THE SCENES: Episode 4 of The Ecopreneurs in London.
Explore More
Q: Why does the parcel industry need to be disrupted?
A: Parcel delivery is a broken industry. The main issue with the big, traditional parcel companies is they have a one-size-fits-all approach. They’ll just use diesel van after diesel van to deliver parcels in Central London, backed by no data, no technology, and no initiative to change. They also treat their employees unfairly. It’s just ripe for disruption.
Q: How is HIVED reinventing the industry?
A: Transportation is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse emissions, and parcel delivery and freight transportation in city centers is the biggest contributor to local air pollution. So, you’ve got two huge problems. Obviously, transportation is made up of a lot of different aspects, but parcel delivery and its supply chain are huge contributors to transportation’s overall greenhouse emissions.
Local air pollution is a huge problem in London. There are 10,000 premature deaths per year in London alone because of local air pollution. It’s just criminal, in our opinion. It shouldn’t happen. When we started out, we knew if we’re building a parcel delivery network that’s going to be here for 100 years, zero-emission is just default for us.
We work from core, first principles thinking. What that means is that for everything we look at within parcel delivery, we look at how we can do it better. We don’t just copy a traditional model. How we do everything, how we treat our employees, what data we’re using, what technology we’re using, what fleets we’re using. We don’t use a one-size-fits-all approach. We have lots of different vehicles in our fleet. We’re feeding the best baked algorithms. We’re literally looking at every single thing that we can to analyze and to continuously improve.
Q: Can you describe your technology platform? Why is it better than what’s out there?
A: Technology is fundamental to our success. We embed it into every process that we use. The “HIVED Mind” is our central intelligence, our brain, for parcel delivery. We feed into it every single piece of data, whether that be how long a delivery driver takes to open the door or how long it takes to onboard a customer. We run artificial intelligence over a lot of these points, and that helps us identify what’s not very efficient, and in turn, that helps us determine areas where we need to be spending our time, energy, and focus. Data and technology are a powerful combination because it allows us to improve what we’re doing on a daily basis.
Listen to Murvah Iqbal on the early days of HIVED.
Emission-Free Parcel Delivery
Eco•pre•neur: an environmentally minded entrepreneur who leads and drives climate action worldwide
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©2022 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy (Your California Privacy Rights) | CCPA Do Not Sell My Information Fortune may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Quotes delayed at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Interactive Data. ETF and Mutual Fund data provided by Morningstar, Inc. Dow Jones Terms & Conditions: S&P Index data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Terms & Conditions. Powered and implemented by Interactive Data Managed Solutions. | EU Data Subject Requests
Read More
BEHIND THE SCENES: Episode 4 of The Ecopreneurs in London.
Explore More
Read More
RIPE FOR DISRUPTION: Why parcel delivery needs innovation to reach net-zero.
Emission-Free Parcel Delivery
Read More
EXPLAINER: See why a carbon-free parcel delivery network is necessary for tackling climate change.
Q: Why is employing your drivers full-time a good
business decision?
A: It’s incredibly good business. People always think, “Oh. Well, the competitors are paying less for their delivery drivers. You’re paying more for your delivery drivers.” However, what they’re not understanding is our delivery drivers appreciate that we’re paying more. They provide an excellent service. You can look at our Trustpilot [consumer review website]. They’re all five-star reviews. When they provide a good service, our retail customers are happy, so we keep them for longer.
Q: What made you want to be an Ecopreneur?
A: I always had this spark of entrepreneurialism. My dad didn’t go to college, but he did start a successful business. I could see that hustle, and around the dinner table, the conversation revolved around business. My uncles are in a similar position. I don’t think many of them went to university, but they’ve created one of the fastest growing independent food chains in the U.K. Having that exposure at an early age embedded that, okay, this is exciting. And for me, those conversations at home around the dinner table were sometimes more exciting than the conversations I was having with my teachers at school.
Q: What advice do you have for aspiring ecopreneurs?
A: There is a lot of hard work and long hours, and you have to be willing to make sacrifices. We’re trying to solve probably the most complex problem in our industry, and that inspires me. That motivates me. Day in and day out, I’m being challenged. If that inspires you too, then I would say: Start yesterday.