Larry Liu: The history and models behind an ecommerce success
Why the CEO of ethnic grocer Weee! never settles for easy answers
What was the model behind this tailor-made solution?
The first question I asked was why Walmart or Costco wasn’t doing this. It’s because Chinese Americans make up less than 2% of the U.S. population. As a Costco buyer, I would never care about that 2%. So for them, it was a structural issue, and that meant I didn’t have to worry about competing with Walmart or Costco.
Then, I asked why there weren’t physical Chinese supermarkets everywhere. The biggest chain had only 50 stores. That’s because Chinese and other immigrants are spread out across the country. The density is so low that ethnic grocery stores are only viable in a few places.
To break through and satisfy Chinese buyers, we had to offer thousands of products and deliver those items, no matter where the customers lived. We realized we couldn’t deliver on demand, because if we did, we would basically have the same issue as the offline Chinese stores — we’d have to have too many warehouses, including in low-demand places. So, in the very beginning, we delivered once a week, and then twice or three times a week.
We developed that model in a matter of months, we tested it, and we validated it through data: a small number of larger warehouses, a high product count, and scheduled delivery, all with very competitive prices.
Brands that succeed with one demographic group often have challenges succeeding with others. Did you face these challenges?
The key was our introduction of the store concept. In our app, we have a Chinese store with Chinese products, a Japanese store with Japanese products. We can make the Japanese store very Japanese. We can make the Filipino store very Filipino, and the Indian store very Indian. Each one is authentic to that ethnic group.
Our initial approach to a Mexican store in 2021 didn’t gain traction, which taught us valuable lessons that we applied when launching MasGusto. I think it didn’t work, because in the brick and mortar world there is no such thing as an Asian and Hispanic grocery chain. The brand could not carry something that did not exist in the real world. So this year, we relaunched our effort to go after Latino customers, with a new app, called MasGusto. It has four stores today: Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Brazilian. That’s how we solved the challenge of extending the brand to different ethnicities.
