On the "Other Side of the Internet"

One of the stories I like to tell about the early days of Julep is about something so routine that we did it each day without giving it much thought at all. It was the email that we sent to our customers telling them that we were preparing their order and that they could expect delivery that afternoon (ordinarily between 13h00 and 16h00).

In a small business, these things aren’t automated the way they would be in a massive e-commerce player. So it’s a manual process taking the Excel spreadsheet for the orders for the day and sending it from the hello@julep.co.za email address that Jules Rosslee and I both have access to (and the replies come to both of us).

One day, I was in a bit of a spin and mistakenly sent the email from my personal email account at Julep and not the “hello” account.

Well, something remarkable happened. I got a bunch of replies that day:

“Thanks so much, Nic. 🌸”

“Hi Nic, my mom is leaving work at 15h30 this afternoon, could you please try to deliver this afternoon before she leaves?”

Kind and warm responses. When we used the generic email address we either got no response to those emails at all, or we got one-sentence replies like “Ensure this is delivered before 15h30.” Often curt, with no salutations or pleasantries.

I remember how that stopped me in my tracks that day with a few thoughts:

When the customer knew that there was a human on the other side of the exact same email, people behaved differently. The funny thing is, at that stage there were still no photos of Jules and me on the website. I didn’t even have my surname on my email account or an email signature. Of course, we’ve now added these things.

There may be a better way to approach the simplest, most routine tasks you do each day but, also, not every repetitive task needs to be automated. Each day there are loads of things that Jules and I do that feel clunky and laborious. But when I look at the craftsmen that I admire, from writers and chefs to painters and cobblers, they all accept that if you shift your focus to sheer optimisation, you start to lose sight of why you do what you do.

Small businesses can lean into their advantage of being able to handle these sorts of things. In the routine interactions with our suppliers, colleagues and drivers, there are all these little moments where we get to be ourselves.

Working in corporate for so many years behind a brand with a household name, I may have forgotten that people buy from people, and not necessarily the brands that they’ve seen in lights.

There’s a beautiful anecdote in Andrew Smith's brilliant book Handwritten (which I recently reviewed here). The nine-year-old cousin of Paul Galatis, Yuppiechef’s director and shareholder, once asked him:

“Can we go to Yuppiechef to see the other side of the internet?”

This idea, that there is an "other side of the internet", where there is humanity in the interactions, is something that we’re incredibly proud to be a part of at Julep. There will always be a human on the other side of each interaction. And you can rest assured that the boxes of fresh flowers are packed, handled and delivered by our team of humans each day.

From our side of the internet to yours, we’ve been so grateful to help so many kind and thoughtful customers create a special moment in their most important people’s day. Without you, we would not exist.

Happy Spring Day! 🌷

First published on LinkedIn here.