The Worst Of Times, The Best Of Times
It is now three years since the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 as a global pandemic. Since then the virus has claimed close to seven million lives, infected over 664M people and disrupted the economies and political systems of almost every country, not to mention the havoc and misfortune it wreaked on all businesses, big or small. In 2020, the last time I wrote something like this, I wasn’t sure MishiPay would make it. We were a team of 30 people caught in the midst of the turmoil caused by the pandemic. It was not looking bright for brick and mortar retail, but I knew I had with me a team of determined fighters who wouldn’t give up on our vision to be in every store in the world.
A few more rolls in the rollercoaster later, my team and I were still enthusiastic about starting 2021. After all, we did end the year up 200% YoY and we now had money in the bank. There wasn’t any reason not to be optimistic. Things couldn’t be worse, could they?
Four months of lockdown and a total of 6 flat months of sales left our sales commissions empty like the last hour before sunset in Ramadan! However, that really was the worst of it.
Since August 2021 we’ve signed a new customer or expanded with an existing customer every single month for the last 19 months.
Just as expected with sunshine, it started in Japan; our friends at MUJI who had stood steadfast with us through the lockdown expanded our partnership by deploying our Product Recommendations solution, driving product awareness and cross-selling opportunities in their brick and mortar stores.
This was followed across the pond by Stellar signing with us to deploy our tech in five of their stores in Florida. From Florida we moved west to Colorado, deploying with the brilliant team at Nude Foods Market; a plastic free grocery store. Our US success continued when, in the autumn of 2021, we began our expansion with Paradies Lagardere, taking our deployment from 2 airports to 24.
All thanks to the amazing perseverance of our teams across the globe, especially the new team members we onboarded in the US.
News of our technology and the value it delivers for retailers was traveling far and wide thanks to coverage in leading publications like Forbes and our win at The Europas.
https://mishipay.com/blogs/mishipay-named-hottest-retail-ecommerce-startup-at-the-europas/
We ended 2021 with another big US win when we signed Love’s Travel Stop and 2022 started with a bang when we signed our first client in the Middle East; Virgin Megastore in Dubai. I was particularly excited about this one as I was born and brought up in Kuwait and I’ve always wanted MishiPay to be live in the Middle East, here was our chance to prove the fit!
https://gulfbusiness.com/mishipay-launches-in-uae-allows-shoppers-to-scan-and-pay/
While all this was happening, I couldn’t imagine the level of growth we would experience with our latest product, the MishiPay self-checkout kiosk, which beat every expectation and every imagined success criteria in the first 6 months of launch. Huge thanks here to Flying Tiger Copenhagen, our launch partner without whom this product may never have seen the light of day.
In the first 6 months of launch, more than half our customer base expanded into taking on the self-checkout kiosk together with scan and go, resulting in us getting 85 to 90% of the in-store transactions in stores with both products. A real inflection point if there ever was one and key to our 490% growth in ARR with which we end this financial year.
The momentum continued when we signed with leading fashion retailer Blooming, our first client in Saudi Arabia, which was closely followed by Dimona in the US for a pop-up deployment of a NASA gift shop and Event Network, also in the US, for the Georgia Aquarium!
The US market has been a tremendous boost for us, going from the first store launched in March 2021 to it being nearly 50% of our current customer base in just 2 years! The Middle East market led by UAE and KSA retailers are set to follow in the same trajectory as they’ve come to being 15% of our customer base in less than a year since our first store went live in the Dubai Mall.
As I look back on the last 3 years I am both grateful and hopeful, grateful to my team and their incredible display of resilience in the face of adversity, with all of our stores being shut down at one point to facing near death as a company. We made it through each of those situations stronger than ever before and now look at a year ahead with unprecedented growth thanks to the work we put in at those hard times, the support and encouragement of the innovative retailer leaders who recognised the transformative potential of our technology and the users who made that real. Finally, I must also thank the investors who continued to believe in our vision and back us through the last 3 years to get to where we are today, truly, thank you. Hope we continue to get the backing of all these players as we continue with our ambition to make MishiPay the dominant method of checkout across the world.
