How often do you see a business concept and say that is smart and you also know it will do very well. This is very rare that you come across something that is so different yet so simple that it will just work. Catering to the masses needs is where the money is made.
Skubu is a new retail store that has opened in South Africa within the last 12 months and the concept is very different to your normal type of shop. Skubu is a combination of 3 African languages (Zulu, Xhosa and Ndebele) and means bucket or container.
I am not often impressed by business concepts and this is one that is definitely well thought out and benefits the consumer. The owner has a saying “It’s expensive to be poor. The more I understood it, the more I fell in love with solving it.” This is very true because if you think about it the smaller packages in the shops are always more expensive than the bigger packages of the same items.
Skubu requires customers to bring in their own containers which saves on packaging and as a result you are only paying for the item and not the packaging. The owner and brains behind this concept is an industrial engineer and was the one who developed the dispensary machines that allow the customer pay for what they can afford.
The Skubu owner has worked in the informal shopping sector and obviously saw the problem millions are faced with daily making choices due to their lack of finances. The idea that someone could get a little bit of everything catering to their budget is what he has created.
If you can only afford R10 worth of sugar or R50 of cooking oil because that is your budget for the month then most shops would not fit your budgetary requirements and you would have to do without certain items. This type of dispensing machine shop allows you to work according to your budget and saving on whatever you are purchasing by as much as 60%.
The consumer receives a card before shopping where they load up a Skubu card and purchase what they need by inputting the values per item that they can afford and then dispense that product into the containers they have bought with them.
The biggest obstacle to overcome getting this type of retail concept off the ground would be the special type of dispensing machines. Being an industrial engineer is where the owners specialty came into it's own being able to achieve this.
If you think that the bulk of the population is earning a R350 monthly grant for being unemployed purchasing a loaf of bread daily is out of reach let alone purchasing any other type of food or cleaning products. The R350 is nothing and is roughly worth $20 so this is a big problem. Turning the R350 into a R500 value through purchasing products smartly is what Skubu offers and why the concept is so clever.
The retail outlet would not need many staff members as each machine is online informing of how much product has been sold and what is left in each machine. Filling the machines is the only work required and that would be done at the back of store out of view. The investment and overheads are the machines that weigh and dispense the exact amounts according to payment.
As a business for Africa this is ideal and if I lived in another African country I would be investigating this concept even further. If you do not work with the poor then you do not know what their needs are and the owner has hit exactly what is needed.
