Repost: Do you understand Honestbee?

Honestbee is in the news again, with reports that it has run into serious cashflow problems.

This just reminded us of a blog post we did last year – the shortest on TLD ever. We are reposting below:

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Since the launch of Habitat by Honestbee in Singapore, a number of you have asked us: “Do you understand Honestbee?”

Well, we don’t.

Just to quote an article my colleague wrote earlier about grocery innovation:

Opportunities in Southeast Asia? Still too early.  

As we mentioned in our previous article, “Where did RedMart go wrong, and why did Lazada buy it?”, the infrastructure and consumer behaviours in Southeast Asia are very different from China. Don’t be too eager to solve a problem that does not exist.  

Not to mention that Southeast Asia’s ecommerce industry is still in its early stage. There are many other problems to solve first and opportunities to grow before tapping into this new retail concept.

It is too early for SEA, but it could be an interesting case for Amazon (which acquired Whole Food last year) to learn from.

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