After our E-commerce session last month, we spoke to Andrew Smith, co-founder of the online kitchen appliance store, Yuppiechef.  We asked him about their outstanding reputation and how they intend to hold onto the personal touches that contribute to the much loved brand.

According to the Hello Peter stats for Yuppiechef over the past 12 months, 99% of mentions were compliments while only 1% were complaints. What specific areas of your strategy would you accredit the good reputation to?

The secret to happy customers is just to do what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it. Customers will turn to places like Hello Peter or other social media platforms when they don’t feel like they are being heard. So in the limelight you have to solve them quickly, don’t make people wait a long time to get responses and jump through hoops just to speak to someone on the phone. People will love you for it.

One of the most loved things about the Yuppiechef brand is the customized cards and little extra gifts received with each purchase. How are you scaling up an online business while still maintaining a personal relationship with customers?

Firstly the most important thing is that we decide that is actually what we want to do. It’s what we’ve wanted to do since the very beginning, and every decision we make along the way says that we will have hand written cards, we will keep the personal services. It’s very hard to go and tap that onto the end of the business, but because we started that way, it’s been okay to continue it. So, our boxes are the only physical interaction we have with our client. We can’t smile at them or shake their hand, and so we put a lot of effort into what goes into the boxes, as it’s a representation of who we are and how much we care.

Thanks Andrew, we appreciate you sharing your business principles with us. To find out more about Yuppiechef, click here. Follow them on Twitter here.

Read more posts by Wendy Tayler

Wendy is the Editor in Chief at Heavy Chef. After 3 years cooking up a storm at UNISA studying English and Communications, Wendy decided to mesh her passion for writing with her love of digital. She firmly believes the world is moving into the online sphere and can be found writing, tracking down great names for interviews, or singing her heart out at the World Wide Creative studio.

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