Seamless Xtra’s Micah Edwards speaks to Erika Doyle, CEO at Drink Dry. Drink Dry is the UAE’s first premium non-alcoholic drinks marketplace. It was established in 2020 and has since launched into Kuwait with plans to continue its expansion into Saudi Arabia.
Erika, you’ve achieved so much since founding Drink Dry including recently being awarded the disruptor of the year award for 2024. What would you say is the secret to successfully disrupting and thriving in the digital marketplace landscape?
I don’t come from the world of digital or e-commerce so for me, it always comes down to two things that I would say I always put at the top of the priority list in terms of what I believe has made Drink Dry the success that it is today. Number one is consumer. So with anything and everything that we do, the focus is always around the consumer. If my e-commerce team come to me and say, we really want to launch this new innovation, we hear them out and look at the investment but my question will always be, is it going to make life easier? Is it going to make a shopping experience better for my consumer? How is it going to affect my consumer?
Secondly, I’m not a fan of using the term vendor. Whenever we look at a partner such as our fulfillment centre or payment gateway partner, I always refer to them as partners. As a small player we are only as strong as our partners are. The more developed our partners are, the better the Drink Dry ecosystem can be. So you can imagine as a start-up company, when we started, the funds to invest in innovation were pretty limited. So we had to rely on our last-mile delivery partner to come to us with really great tech. At the same time, we were relying on our fulfillment centre to have a really great fulfillment system so they can take in our stock and their system does the job for us. I think as we grow in volume and scale and as the number of orders grows for us, the team grows, too, and then we become significant to our partners as well.
But for me, the two most important components to success in the digital space are remembering who your customer is and making life easier for them single day. And then making sure that you work with partners who have the same values as you, speak the same language as you, and to be honest, are better equipped than you are. So, always invest in your partnerships and with people you work with.
So in that case, for entrepreneurs and founders who are hungry to grow their business how would say they can foster those relationships with partners?
I think that hunger for improvement comes from constantly bettering interaction with your consumer. We have quite a unique business model as Drink Dry because a lot of the products that we import are exclusive to us, which gives us a huge first mover’s advantage and puts us in a really favourable position when it comes to competition. However, the category of non-alcoholic drinks globally is forever growing and expanding. So we can’t take it for granted that a Drink Dry store version two will never pop up from a competitor.
We have to make sure that the full structure of Drink Dry store is five steps ahead if the competition came here. We are incredibly fortunate where we are in the UAE that the ecosystem for particularly start-up e-commerce businesses is so favourable and you can choose who you want to work with. Therefore you can offer your consumers an incredible four hour delivery from order to their door. You can deliver it chill. You can deliver it on fairies and unicorns, you name it. You will find the partner who can do it for you. And then I think when it comes to innovation, we also have to remember that hunger for success comes from innovation, because if you get stuck and if you get complacent in what you are doing, that’s when you start losing your competitive advantage. We have a fantastic product range and parallels and we are forever adding to get further ahead of any competition that will come this way.
Yes, so you’re not just thinking about next month. You’re thinking about how you can stay ahead in five years time?
I’ll give you a good example. For me, the biggest win we have taken in the last four years was winning the e-commerce company of the year at the Arabian Business awards in January, this year. We beat Deliveroo, a billion dollar company and another very successful marketplace here in the region, yet we don’t have our own tech. I think the reason Drink Dry managed to take that win home is first because have great metrics and stats in terms of what we do. But it’s also about being smart and creative with the existing technology, and that takes time. You have some amazing companies that have great valuations because they create their own tech, they do their own programmes and that becomes their IP.
What we do is we go out to places like Seamless and we meet absolutely everybody who’s playing in that space and we play with what’s available. Seamless is like sending a kid to a toy shop, where everybody’s showing you all these new toys and you find two toys together that would would work well. So maybe it goes against popular opinion because a lot of people are raising a lot of capital. A lot of VC funds are funding the new tech and everything that’s going on in the space. But for us, the success has been working with other people and using other people’s innovation on mass to make Drink Dry better.
Now, apart from the consumer and collaboration side of things have you got other advice for aspiring entrepreneurs or business owners who would like to be successful in the retail and e-commerce world.
I think consistency is hugely underestimated in such a fast moving space. There’s a lot of temptation to change courses too often. Particularly when you start a start-up business, there’s a lot of temptation when one thing goes wrong. Pivoting a little bit is okay but for me, the biggest advice I have for anyone is know your strategy. First, understand your product and understand your consumer. Understand what you’re trying to achieve and be consistent with your strategy. It’s okay to pivot. It’s okay to adjust things a little bit, but you have to have patience and you have to have persistency to keep going forward and not lose sight of what you do.
If you are a tech company, go out and build amazing tech. If you are a marketplace, remember the key basic things; what your consumer wants and your marketplace. For example, people are looking for product range, price comparison, convenient delivery, product information, quick checkout. Don’t try to overcomplicate things. If you are a last-mile delivery partner, think of us start-up companies as your customer and how you can make life easy for me? Come up with the tech that’s easy for me and my customer. And we’ll work with you. Remember who you are and I think just stick to your strategy and consistency is key.
Now, I will see you at the Seamless Middle East show on the 14th and the 16th of May, this year, at Dubai World Trade Centre. What can the audience learn from joining you at Seamless? I believe your panel is ‘Capturing Commerce Success with Convenience: Offering a Frictionless and Satisfying Shopping Experience.’
For me it’s all about putting the consumer first. It’s about that frictionless, convenient experience for your consumer and looping your partners into what you do. We are so incredibly spoiled in the UAE in terms of e-commerce and deliverables and what we expect as a consumer. And I use this example of when I was swimming once with my four or five month old daughter in the pool, and I decided that I wanted floaties, a specific type of floaties for her, I went on an app and I found the exact thing that I wanted in the exact size, and it said 40 minutes delivery. I was annoyed it was going to take that long and made me realise that the consumers in our market, specifically in UAE, are spoiled in one way.
Consumer expectations are high because there is a high supply of what you can have. So, in this panel that I’m on, people can learn how to meet those expectations for the consumer. We have a promise of a four-hour delivery window. We have a promise of same-day delivery. And it’s challenging sometimes. So if anybody is looking to get some advice on tech that they need to use, who to work with or even what mistakes we’ve made in trying to meet those consumer expectations. I think that’s a really great panel to come and listen to and see what’s possible in the UAE.
