Artizone

» see artizone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Artizone came out of Israel in 2009, founded by Alex Zeltcer, Lior Lavy, Shmuel Zichel, Sagi Briteman and Yehudit Buchnik as a spinoff from the local branch of Dassault Systemes. The product landed in Dallas in 2011 with 22 local artisans on it. The idea was narrow and clear. Take the small food businesses worth driving across a city for, give each of them a page on one site, and let a customer fill a single basket from all of them and have it brought to the house.

Chicago came in January 2012, covering Cook county and the collar counties around it. Denver followed in 2015. At its widest the roster ran to about 220 producers, which is a lot of separate small businesses to keep supplied with orders and a lot of separate pickups to run before anything reaches a customer.

What killed it was ordinary. Artizone had been funded largely out of the profits of a software company the founders still ran in Israel, and the delivery business never generated enough on its own to cover itself. From November 2015 they went looking for outside money and did not find it. On 2 February 2016 the site stopped, and the trade press in both cities used the word abrupt.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how close it was ~

Lavy gave an interview three weeks after the shutdown that reads unlike most post-mortems, because he would not concede the model. His numbers: at Artizone's cost base, breaking even in Dallas needed 200 orders a day, and they had reached about a third of that. He wanted three to five million dollars and believed a year of it would have made the Dallas operation profitable. "We ran out of money," he said. "We spent November to January trying to raise money but it was really impossible to get it in such a short space of time."

Whether he was right is unknowable now, and it was an unlucky year to be asking. The venture money that poured into food delivery in 2014 and 2015 was pulling back hard by early 2016, and the companies that went down over the following two years, Sprig and then Munchery, were far better capitalized than this one and could not make the arithmetic work either.

~ what the vendors lost ~

The part worth remembering about Artizone is what it was for the people selling through it. A one-location bakery in Plano does not build a delivery operation. It cannot carry the drivers or the software, and the whole reason it is any good is that it is one location. A marketplace like this was the only route such a business had to a customer twenty miles away, and when the marketplace closed with no notice, the shop was back to the counter it started with.

That is the trade every small vendor makes with a platform, and it stays invisible until the platform stops. Artizone was five years old, well liked by the food press in two cities, and it went away on a Tuesday.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »