Anyone with a child has probably been searching for the right stroller at some point: a baby car seat and buggy, or a combination model – and a lightweight stroller for traveling? After a few years, the stroller is no longer of any use and needs to be sold or given away. Strollme wants to radically simplify the stroller business with a subscription model: Depending on the child's age, customers receive the right stroller for a monthly fee. In an interview, the founders talk about how the stroller subscription business works.
Munich Startup: Who are you and what do you do? Please introduce yourselves briefly!
Strollme: We are Timon Beutel (33) and Sebastian Reichelt (32). Together, we founded Strollme – your stroller subscription – at the beginning of 2020. We offer the world's greenest stroller on a subscription basis, i.e., a leasing model for strollers. Timon is a freelance UX/UI designer, and Sebastian is a key account manager at Ralph Lauren. As a team, we cover the two core areas of product and operations. We also have support from colleagues in social media, advertising, PR, and logistics.
Munich Startup: What problem does your startup solve?
Strollme: Timon has been a father for a few weeks now, and Sebastian will be in September. What we've both noticed is that having children is expensive. Especially at the beginning, there are significant investments involved, and the stroller is the most important one. Four-figure sums can quickly become necessary. At the same time, it's not particularly sustainable to produce a new stroller for every child. In Germany, almost 800,000 children are born every year, but around 840,000 new strollers are sold. That doesn't make sense to us, so we looked for a sustainable solution. The result: Strollme. Parents and expectant parents can get the world's greenest stroller through a subscription model. This means that for a monthly fee of €19.50, they lease a brand-new stroller from us, or €12.50, a used stroller. We offer models for three different age groups, covering ages 0-4. As soon as the child has outgrown the first model, parents get the larger stroller insert and can continue to use the frame thanks to our modular system.
When a stroller is no longer needed, our customers return the entire stroller to us, and the subscription is terminated. We refurbish the returned item and return it to the cycle as a used model. We source the strollers from the Dutch brand "Greentom."
Strollme has a high working capital requirement
Munich Startup: But that's been around for a long time!
Strollme: There are no subscription models for strollers of this kind in Germany yet. Similar models are available on the market, but these are designed for short-term rentals—for example, when grandparents come to visit.
Munich Startup: What have been your three biggest challenges so far?
Strollme: 1: Customer payment behavior. We are constantly optimizing the payment methods we offer.
2: Logistics. Thanks to the modular system, each stroller consists of several individual parts, available in different colors. Here, it's important to ensure that everything is always packed correctly and delivered to the customer. At the same time, the coronavirus crisis led to delivery delays and missing deliveries, especially at the beginning. We now have this well under control thanks to a new logistics partner.
3: Financing: We purchase the strollers from the manufacturer, so we have a high working capital requirement. Currently, we are still completely bootstrapped, but are now looking for seed financing to scale faster.
Munich Startup: How are things going?
Strollme: We're very satisfied. We spent the last year gathering a lot of quantitative and qualitative feedback and conducting extensive testing with our MVP. This allowed us to hit the ground running at the beginning of the year. We're currently seeing high double-digit numbers of strollers being sold to customers, and the churn rate is promising.
“Fear or excessive need for security block innovation”
Munich Startup: How do you rate Munich as a startup location?
Strollme: Due to the current coronavirus crisis, we're unfortunately unable to benefit from startup events and public pitches at the moment. However, we generally feel very comfortable here.
Munich Startup: Risk or security?
Strollme: Risk. I think someone with a high need for security will have a hard time founding a startup. Especially in the beginning, everything is based on hypotheses that have to be proven first. The risk of suddenly losing one's capital because an idea doesn't work out is always there. Fear or an excessive need for security certainly hamper innovation here.
