In Sierra Leone, she worked for the United Nations Special Court. In Albania, she trained defence lawyers on the intricacies of the European Convention on Human Rights. And in Macedonia, she was an election monitor for the European Union.
Now, though, Marisa Leaf is delivering groceries in London’s leafy Islington. After 10 years in the high-pressure world of human rights, she decided to found Hubbub, an online food delivery service – and she says she doesn’t regret her radical career change.
“I spent 10 years working in all sort of places,” she says, “building up my CV in order to move my career in a certain direction – only to do a complete 180-degree turn and put everything on the line. But I really believe in it and I also think it can be a profitable business.”
Online grocery delivery services are becoming increasingly common, although questions remain about just how quickly they can move to profitability.
This week, attention has been focused on Ocado, following its flotation on the London Stock Exchange on Wednesday. The delivery company, which started trading in 2002, saw its sales increase 25 per cent to almost £450m in the 12 months to November 2009, and operating losses fall 33 per cent to £14.4m in the same period. But the company has only just reported earnings before interest taxation depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) of £9.2m – and its shares dropped 14 per cent when they began trading over fears that they had been overvalued.
So what hope can there be for a small local player in this market?
Hubbub aims to differentiate itself from its larger peers by sourcing products only from local, independent stores – rather than supermarkets. Its aim is to assuage north Londoners’ guilt about coming home late from work and popping to the supermarket rather than supporting their local butcher or baker.
The service currently operates within a radius of approximately two to three miles around the Highbury & Islington area, sourcing food from eight local shops. These range from the straightforward, such as Frank Godfrey Family Butcher, to the more refined (for which read expensive) Ottolenghi – a London chain of cafés.
“There is no cost for them joining, and we bring them new business,” Leaf says. “It should be a no-brainer.”
Before a shop can sign up to Hubbub, however, it has to be carefully vetted for quality of produce, level of service, variety and sourcing policies.
“The people we work with are entrepreneurs themselves,” Leaf explains. “For example, the butcher has been here for more than 100 years. They know their market and the vast majority of what the butcher, fishmonger or grocer sells is British produce – because that’s what they do best.”
Leaf claims that this is a business as well as a passion, but her language remains littered with phrases that hint at her previous role.
She talks of wanting to “make a huge difference” and how people want to use local shops as it is “the right thing to do”.
Her career path might have changed radically, but the human rights lawyer appears to have morphed into a local activist: same principles, less glamorous location.
In October 2007, she left her full-time job as a barrister and worked part-time as a human rights adviser to the Northern Ireland policing board.
She spent the next year researching and modelling her business idea, reading as widely as possible and speaking to as many shops as she could.
Then came Hubbub phase one. Leaf opened on a pilot basis in November 2008 with just two shops signed up: Godfrey’s and La Fromagerie, a cheese shop.
Initially, she planned to run for just six weeks and close down again before the Christmas rush became too much for the fledgling company to cope with.
“I thought Christmas could possibly be completely overwhelming,” she says, “and that you’d have to be crazy to do that. Then I got to about three to four weeks before, and just thought, ‘Maybe I am crazy. Let’s do it.’ ”
Leaf had set up a Hubbub website “as cheaply as we could”. The front end, complete with e-commerce for customers, cost about £10,000. But the back end was still completely manual – literally, Marisa and a van.
“I felt like the Wizard of Oz, sitting behind the curtain pulling all the levers,” she recalls. “An order would come in and I’d physically have to take it to the shop and then on to the customer. I did everything myself.”
Help was needed, particularly in the run-up to Christmas, so a driver and a van were hired for £2,000 over a six-week period. About 10,000 leaflets were printed at a cost of £500, and Leaf persuaded several friends to help her hand them out at local tube stations and shops – going door to door whenever there was time.
Orders started to come in, averaging about £60 a basket. And with the business apparently working, Leaf decided to extend phase one for another year.
Phase two, however, involved serious money. Up until then, Leaf had been using a desk in an office for £350 a month, but realised she was spending most of her time on the road.
Operating costs were low, but Leaf says the intention was always to make Hubbub scaleable. To do that, she invested in a computer system that was costed at £250,000 and funded through selling equity stakes, although Leaf remains the majority shareholder. This new platform now allows for multiple delivery areas to be supplied individually by their own local shops.
The plan, Leaf explains, is to expand to the whole of London and then, eventually, the rest of the UK. A financing round is now on the cards.
“I have had a lot of approaches from private investors as well as VCs, but up until now we haven’t needed it,” she says. “Now we are sufficiently stable and growing at a fast enough pace that it makes sense to accelerate that.”
But growth, as the Ocado model shows, does not lead to immediate profits. Leaf estimates Hubbub should be profitable by the fourth quarter of 2011, with turnover expected to reach £1m.
The lesson she has learnt is simple: when launching an online grocery delivery service it is imperative to keep operating costs to a bare minimum.
