Pimp Up recounts its funding experience

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Can you introduce yourself? 

Hello everyone, I'm Manon, the co-founder of Pimp Up. At Pimp Up, we make baskets of fruits and vegetables that are saved from waste by the producers and that are delivered to individuals in relay points. Today, I'm here to talk about our collaboration with Karmen. 

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What does Pimp Up do? 

Pimp Up is a solution whose mission is to enhance the value of all the products that do not fit into the classic distribution channels, at the production and processing stage, for aesthetic reasons. These are products that are a little bit odd, that we are not used to see in the supermarket shelves, but also all the other products that are simply not valued. We have to save them and for that we make baskets that we deliver in relay points in the city centers.

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Why did Pimp Up need funding? 

As Pimp Up is a solution designed for individuals on a subscription business model, we have a real notion of customer acquisition and this is a challenge for us, with objectives to be broken down over the year, all in a fairly ambitious approach.

We also wanted to diversify our acquisition channels, to do paid ads and therefore we really needed financing for the advertising/marketing/acquisition part. Also, we thought it was a shame to dig into our cash flow for acquisition that we know will be profitable at some point, given that we know the retention of our customers, their acquisition cost.  

The calculation was therefore quickly made, Karmen was an obvious way to avoid digging into our cash flow while continuing to grow at Pimp Up.

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What were your selection criteria? 

First of all, it was the feeling with the Karmen team. At Pimp Up, we discovered the RBF via a workshop at our incubator, the Big in Montpellier, a week before our first call with Karmen. 

Following that, we benchmarked what was proposed on the market and finally, it is with Karmen that we decided to do business, we had a really good contact with Baptiste, the co-founder, and, by the way, their offer was the most interesting for us.

Can you tell us about the funding set up? 

When they say that it's fast, it's really very fast. There is a fairly easy onboarding on the platform, we fill in some information to generate our profile and the interface on which we will be able to manage our different funding tranches.

And then, once the offer in the form of a loan was proposed to us, and then validated, within a day or two, we had the financing in our account. Then, the debits are done automatically, especially if you use tools like Stripe. The process is very, very fast.

How did Karmen contribute to the success of Pimp Up? 

Concretely, our growth, our success, is correlated to the volume of product that we save from waste, volume that is directly correlated to the number of baskets we sell and therefore to the number of active subscribers. 

With our Karmen financing, we were able to do long-term advertising, since we did two tranches of financing. So it's been four, five months now that we've been accompanied by Karmen on this project. 

Our subscriber base has grown by 50% since that time and that's largely due to the ads we've run that were funded by Karmen. So in a way, we can say that Karmen is still participating in the success of Pimp Up since we don't necessarily intend to stop now.

How didthe repeat go?

How did the repeat take place? So Pimp Up has two notions linked to its evolution, to its success, there is the geographical expansion and then the expansion of the number of active subscribers of the offer. So Anaïs and I launched the company in Montpellier because we were based there, in parallel to our studies, we created Pimp Up, so there are not too many questions to ask.

And then Toulouse for the replication, it was a first test to see if it was working. So it was very recent, in September we, we launched a little bit all the acquisition for Toulouse and we opened in December. And the second financing from Karmen came at that time, we needed to make marketing expenses that we used to make lead generation, to have people on the waiting list and therefore to make ads before having income on the spot, but on the basis of the first tranche of financing, we were quite confident in the fact that precisely the customers, once they are informed of the opening of Pimp Up, arrive, they have the customer value that we expect.

So there are different use cases ultimately to everyday acquisition. And then it can also help fund a launch where there's a little bit more marketing spend at some point to boost it from the beginning.

How do you see the continuation of our collaboration?

How do I see the continuation of our collaboration? Because I think that the word collaboration is well chosen, it's not only an accompaniment in the form of a loan, because the timing alone makes it close, finally we have regular contacts. So how do I see the future ? Karmen supports Pimp Up in its growth by helping it to keep its cash flow in check thanks to cash advances that are rapidly reimbursed. So Pimp Up plans to continue to grow. I think we're just going to stay in touch for future installments and keep doing this repeat session.

The final word?

The final word: go do some RBF!