Venezuelans Andreina Urriola and Melissa Magill recently launched Geobici, an environmentally friendly bicycle delivery service in Lima, Peru, and have witnessed aggressive growth in seven months.
Geobici was launched on March 1 with three cyclists making deliveries for just one restaurant four hours per day. And now, Geobici has 15 fixed clients with 13 cyclists making food and document deliveries all day.
“Since March, we have covered more than 12,000 kilometers in deliveries,” 31-year-old Urriola told Latin Business Daily.
“We have the vision that within 18 to 24 months we can have 50 to 60 cyclists rolling all over Lima,” Urriola, who studied marketing and previously worked for a financial company, said. “We are getting two new clients per month, and if this continues, we can have 40 to 50 clients within 24 months,” she added.
Urriola and Magill hope that a new mobile application will bring about logistical improvements.
Bicycle deliveries can offer advantages compared with motor vehicle deliveries as there are no fuel charges and maintenance is less expensive.
“I am sure we have the lowest delivery price, however, our main product is the ecology. Our client does not seek us for the value but to help the environment,” Urriola said.
For short distances, the delivery time for a bicycle is the same as for a motorized one, added Magill, a psychiatrist.
She said the business idea came as they started to “look around to find what was going on in the world" and realized that a new service had to be ecological and have the potential to make things easier regarding time and energy saving.
While the use of bicycles is still growing in Latin America, much more needs to be done to reach the level of bicycle use in other cities, such as the Netherlands, Magill said.
As for the future, there are plans to transport Geobici, which uses social media for advertising, to other cities.
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