Case 08 · Marketplace · 2020–2022
FixMix
We pivoted our shoe, watch and leather repair service three times on what customers did. Bundling put average order value up 150%.
- Role
- Founder, CEO & CTO at FixMix, Warsaw, January 2020 to May 2022
- Team
- The friends I founded it with · the craftspeople who did the repairs · bike couriers in the Warsaw pilot
- B2C clients, plus corporate partners
- 412
- average order value after the cart and volume discounts
- +150%
- of orders via parcel lockers
- ~75%
01
We started by the book
My friends and I took an Executive MBA project to market. We surveyed 310 people in March 2020, the month the pandemic reached Poland. Proper sampling, proper analysis. A year in the market proved most of it wrong.
Our 2020 deck: collection from home, the office or a parcel locker, sold direct and as an employee benefit.
02
The market picked lockers
We’d built pick-your-slot courier booking because 81.6% of respondents wanted exact times. Working from home, most clients didn’t need one; a locker meant dropping parcels off while walking the dog. We improved the locker experience and pricing instead; lockers grew from a roughly even split to around 75%.
An earlier, courier-first booking flow.
03
I did courier runs on purpose
Many shoes I unpacked at a cobbler’s were caked in mud he’d stopped noticing years ago. Cleaning went into the price. Craftspeople said they couldn’t price a job before seeing it, but after dozens of jobs most fell in a narrow band. Risk-aversion, not pricing complexity. We absorbed the risk.
One fixed price up front, with the pricing risk on us.
04
The orders said otherwise
People said they wanted their things handled personally, then bundled four ordinary pairs into one shipment and complained about paying courier fees twice. A cart, volume discounts and free delivery over 300 PLN sent average order value up 150%. Values-led ads underperformed. Badly. A before-and-after of mud-caked Timberlands doubled conversion.
The relaunched 3.0 homepage: volume discounts, free delivery over 300 PLN, before-and-after repairs.
05
We still shut it down
Craftspeople were wary, so we handled their first three to five orders by hand, then built SMS integration because that’s what their phones did. We had 412 B2C clients and EU pre-seed funding. But our craftspeople network couldn’t keep up, and we shut it down in 2022.
Looking back
Repair time sounded like a problem, so we promised one-week repairs. The timing complaints were about not knowing. The answer had been in our survey all along: status notifications and interactivity, 82.3%. Next time I’d read answers as needs and let behaviour pick the solution.