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|| Aditya Anupkumar / Andreas Kleinschmidt / Antonella Squadrito / Arturo Gutierrez / Giuseppe Bono / Guilherme Costa ||!

Information Technology and Innovation // Business Model Analysis!

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What is MyMuesli.com?!

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MyMuesli.com is a mass-customized service letting users prepare their own mixes of organic Muesli from 80 possible organic ingredient options.!These mixes are delivered to consumers’ doorsteps within four days.!

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Who is the customer?!

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We believe that the core user base for MyMuesli.com is who John Gerzema calls “Spend-Shifters”: value-oriented, sophisticated consumers. !Maslow would perhaps have placed their need-state relationship with MyMuesli.com in the Belonging and Esteem blocks of his pyramid.!They crave a new, more ‘authentic’ consumption. They’re technologically engaged, want their own spin on stuff they do, and they want to live healthy.!

Belonging!

Esteem!

* Spend Shift, 2010 / Y&R BAV Data!

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What is the customer value proposition?!

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With 80 ingredients (clockwise, types of flavoring, types of nuts, types of fruits, types of grains/cereals) to choose from, you can have 566 quadrillion combinations of organic Muesli via their service, allowing every single person to have a perfectly customized breakfast experience.!There is also something to be said with regards to the “signaling” that is inherent in using certain kinds of products and services – you can’t deny that, beyond the ‘goodness’ of the product, there is likely a case of communicating ‘discernment’ inherent in buying it.!

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Another Model we could apply to understand what it is that MyMuesli.com delivers would be the Tetrad, which explores the impact of a given medium/practice on its surroundings. !The impact is always four-fold – new media/practices enhance – reverse – retrieve and obsolesce old media/practices when they come into being.!In the case of MyMuesli.com, we could posit that, in the breakfast experience, it enhances ‘Authenticity’, reverses ‘complexity and ritual’ to ‘Simplicity’, retrieves ‘Eating Healthy’ and obsolesces ‘Mass Consumption’ in the form of cereals.!This is a useful way of understanding the product’s impact on culture, and where future challenges may arise from.!

MyMuesli.com  

Authen1city   Simplicity  

Ea1ng  Healthy  

Mass  Consump1on  

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How do they provide it?!

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MyMuesli.com has a two-pronged strategy. !It’s consumer-facing side is one of Product Leadership and Customer Intimacy. It delivers healthy food in beautiful packaging right to your door. It also develops use-cases. So they have a kick-start cereal, organic porridge, weight-loss cereal, cereal designed for kids, Gluten-free, work-out cereals, biking cereals; all based on what people have liked/bought/used the product for in the past.!And they deliver this through Operational Excellence, with a technological grounding that allows them to mix 80 different kinds of ingredients (566 quadrillion variations, if you recall) and create and deliver the finished product to the user within four days, and they do so incredibly cost-effectively.!

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Why is this innovative?!

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MyMuesli.com taps into a major emerging cultural trend – that of mass-customization / bespoke services. It harnesses the true spirit of Long Tail economics. Where the Long Tail posits that, no matter how unconventional or arcane an offering, it will find a buyer; MyMuesli.com flips this on its head by building their technology and supply-chain around fulfilling those very tastes, from the most obvious to the most arcane. !The graphic you see to the right is basically the permutations and combinations of the mixes you can choose, and the size of the circles indicates popularity. Something for everyone.!But it’s not just that. As we explored with the Maslow Hierarchy and the Tetrad, the service also has an important socio-psychological dimension – it generates that ring of perfection (YOUR perfect mix) combined with authenticity and simplicity (healthy living).!

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What is the vulnerability in this business model?!

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To look at potential threats we explored Michael Porter’s Five Forces model. One assumption we are going to make is that the “Industry” in which MyMuesli.com operates is “Organic and Healthy products” – so think of Whole Foods, Innocent, etc as potential competitors.!

When we studied suppliers, we found, for example, that at one point MyMuesli.com had bought up ALL of the frozen strawberries in Germany to use in their products. That is strong supply-chain management, and they would have to ensure they remain in a strong position with suppliers (think about how Apple keep RAM prices down for themselves, for example – they use 60% of the RAM produced in the World.)!

We have already discussed customer needs and between Customer Needs and Industry Competitors we believe that MyMuesli.com is well-placed.!

The market is still very new, but for example we discovered an Australian competitor (MixMyMuesli.com.au) who started up two years after MyMuesli.com – so there is the possibility of competition, but in a still growing market, we believe there is room for more competition.!

Which leaves us with Substitutes. A prolonged recession or other system shocks could make their broader user-base shrink as people cut back and search for cheaper alternatives, of which there are many. But when you consider that MyMuesli.com has grown exponentially YoY since they were first created in 2007, they have so far shown themselves to be immune to the current crisis.!

Industry Competitors!

New Entrants!Suppliers!

Customer Needs!Substitutes!

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Is it sustainable?!

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We feel, based on our analysis, that MyMuesli is a sustainable enterprise, certainly in the short run. Apart from developing use-cases for consumers, they have also expanded their product lines carefully.!

They now sell highly cost effective trial packs featuring an array of mixes, so you can try out the various flavors and combinations for the same amount of money. They also sell mix-and-go insta-packs, to expand where/how consumers can consume the MyMuesli experience. And in the past year they have also started developing recipe guides, porridges, juices and coffee to make MyMuesli a much larger part of peoples’ food habits.!

Perhaps most importantly, they have begun opening real-life cafés. This is important because it allows MyMuesli to transform itself from an online-store-that-delivers-what-you-like, to a Disney Land of healthy eating.!

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MyMuesli.com made €2million+ in revenues its second year, and since then has made about €300,000 in profits p.a. consistently, even as its workforce expanded from 3 people to 100+, and they expanded from Germany to Netherlands, the UK and Switzerland in this time.!We referred to “Spend-Shifters” as the potential consumer for MyMuesli.com. The report also highlights some of the percentages of existing populations who exhibit similar behavior.!So from the countries MyMuesli.com is not yet present in, we see that Spend-Shifters constitute 55% in the US, 53% in France, 51% in Canada, 45% in Australia and Italy, 44% in Singapore, 41% in Brazil, 38% in Russia and Spain, 34% in India and Mexico, and 21% in China. !We acknowledge that not all these groups can afford to buy MyMuesli.com, and maybe more than just this mindset consumes it. !But if this is the mindset MyMuesli.com taps in to, we can agree they have much room for expansion.!

* Spend Shift, 2010 / Y&R BAV Data!

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We believe that the future for mass-customized web-to-real-life businesses is strong. We love, for example, projects like Quarterly.Co and Kopi; which combine exploring ideas, foods and so on, with an element of social curation.!And then there is the organic and natural foods movement, that has only grown and grown in the past decade. !

So to close, we believe MyMuesli.com is an incredibly fascinating project as it harnesses elements from both these major trends, and we’re keen to seeing how it develops over the next few years. (We’re all signed up on the waiting list for when they launch in Spain. )!

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Fín!