An e-commerce business that started as a part-time project was sold for R470 million and is now opening new stores accross South Africa
E-commerce business Yuppiechef was started as a part-time project by South African developers Andrew Smith and Shane Dryden before being sold to Mr Price for around R470 million in 2021.
The company has become one of Mr Price’s biggest brands, seeing yearly double-digit sales growth. It also now has 25 brick-and-mortar stores nationwide.
Andrew Smith and Shane Dryden were building websites and software for companies in South Africa from 1999 before founding Yuppiechef in 2006 as an experiment.
The platform has grown into one of South Africa’s largest e-commerce retailers, winning several awards and successfully expanding into physical retail, even as the sector faced headwinds.
In an interview on The Money Show, Smith said that Yuppiechef was initially crafted as an e-commerce kitchenware business before branching out into homeware.
It was one of many ideas the founders had after spending years working for other companies in South Africa to develop their online businesses.
“We actually started with bug-zapping rackets and country flags and various other things,” he said. What would become Yuppiechef was just another product experiment.
The pair observed a gap in the South African market between products available internationally and locally, but not in the shops everyone was visiting.
“Could we use online, use e-commerce to offer products that weren’t as easily available and sell them to customers,” said Smith in an interview with HeavyChef.
He attributed Yuppiechef’s early success to selling kitchenware and speciality products people wanted but couldn’t necessarily get elsewhere.
“We chose brands and products that, if you wanted, you wouldn’t know where to get it and so you would search for it online.”
The platform’s early focus on products aided its business, as customers who didn’t know what Yuppiechef was would recognise products they wanted.
Smith and Dryden used their experience as developers, with Dryden’s design background and Smith’s software background, to build the first version of Yuppiechef themselves.
“But it took a really long time,” said Smith, who added that the pair built Yuppiechef into a site that they would want to use themselves.
“What information would we want on the product page? Trying to put ourselves in the shoes of a customer.”
Early challenges and doing something different
Yuppiechef launched online with just 32 products and was run from Smith’s lounge in Plumstead, Cape Town. The website faced challenges early on due to low customer uptake.
Business was slow soon after launching, before the pair decided to introduce a way to personalise each sale.
A customer called “Denise” placed an order, which neither of the founders recognised, following months of sales to friends and family members.
Smith and Dryden decided to include a handwritten letter in their order to Denise. An off-the-cuff idea that would become a major piece of the company’s branding going forward.
“The idea of just putting a product in a box and shipping it off — there has to be something more than that,” said Smith.
“If I write something and I sign it from Andrew, the person knows there’s a human. If something goes wrong, I can come back to the human.”
Smith urged other e-commerce entrepreneurs finding their way in the competitive market to do something unique in their businesses.
Handwritten letters to customers are still a feature of Yuppiechef. By 2019, the team at Yuppiechef had written over 1 million thank-you cards for every single order that left its warehouse.
“E-commerce is not easy. It’s incredibly hard. There are a couple of things that make e-commerce challenging,” said Smith.
“Firstly, a lot of retail exists with what I call a geographic monopoly. The second part that makes e-commerce challenging is that it’s not a very mature industry yet in South Africa.”
Yuppiechef was sold to Mr Price in a deal valued between R470 million and R500 million. Smith said that the sale was driven by feelings of instability, especially after a tough period during the pandemic.
Smith and Dryden remained at Yuppiechef until 2022, a year after the acquisition, before finally departing the company they had built from scratch.
The pair are already involved in their next e-commerce platform, an online store for outdoor and camping equipment called Brave Hardy, which delivers anywhere in South Africa.
More photos of Yuppiechef and its founders
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