Recorded live at Shoptalk, Phillip and Brian sit down with Heather Rivera, Chief Business Officer at Wing (an Alphabet company), to talk about how Wing has crafted our five-minute delivery future. Spoiler: the novelty of drones wearing off might be the best thing that ever happened to the industry. Building the Drone While We’re Flying It Key takeaways: Wing&#x27;s fastest recorded delivery: 2 minutes, 37 seconds. Average is under five minutes. 25% of Wing customers order three times a week – habit, not novelty. Wing just announced its largest residential drone delivery expansion yet, with Walmart, covering 270+ store locations. ~70% of Walmart SKUs fit in Wing&#x27;s current delivery box – roughly 50,000 products. Wing recently doubled its payload capacity from 2.5 lbs to 5 lbs, opening new SKU and category possibilities. [00:20:39] &quot;I want this technology to become unremarkable for people because it just becomes part of the way they go about their lives.&quot; – Heather Rivera [00:13:09] &quot;I predict there&#x27;s gonna be whole sets of new companies that design existing products to fit into the five pound baskets.&quot; – Brian Associated Links: Get STRATA Check out Future Commerce on YouTube Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

LIVE at Shoptalk Spring: Wing’s Heather Rivera on Five-Minute Futures

Future Commerce

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Future Commerce

## Transcript

Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip. I'm Brian. And we're at Shoptalk and this is day two. We're at the media marketing stage and if you haven't heard already, our brand new book is out. It's called Strata. It's about the 10 aesthetics of commerce and one of those aesthetics is we want everything that we want right now. And here to talk about that is the chief business officer of Wing. She is Heather Rivera. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Excited to be here. How are we getting everything right now? Apparently still not fast enough for consumers.

Oh my gosh. And so that's where Wings comes in. We have average flight times of less than five minutes and so that means we can get the products that consumers love from the retailers they love to them really, really fast. And how fast are you talking? I think our fastest delivery clocked in is something like two minutes and 37 seconds. Something like .0723. Exactly.

But on average, you can expect the time from kind of when the drone takes off to when it safely delivers that package to your yard to be under five minutes. Wow. That's crazy. We're talking about hour delivery? No, forget it. How about five minutes delivery? I was at an announcement yesterday of a very large company who says we can get your package to you now today in under six hours. And I was like, I'm talking to someone tomorrow who's getting it to you in two minutes and 30 seconds. 37.02.

Yeah, we're measuring it in milliseconds now. You know, Heather, a lot of what we talk about on this show and on all of our media channels to our audiences, the shift of culture. I do think a lot of that culture shift is that we do have this expectation that we want things and want them quicker. And I think that we're more willing to give up something in return. The value is there. We'll participate in value exchange. We'll pay more for that service.

Tell us a little bit about Wings business model, how you're partnering with retailers to make that happen and that sort of value exchange with the customer to make it happen. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Consumers really want things in an almost near instant modality. And I think that really got unlocked by COVID. Sure. And so when I think about the use case for groceries, for instance, which is one of the key use cases for drone delivery is a forgotten grocery item. Yes.

Grocery delivery really wasn't a thing before COVID. Right. And COVID kind of brought that in. And now that's become an expected behavior. But the problem, like you said, is that it still takes too long to get those items to you when you need them quickly. Yes. So if you can think about busy working parents, it's Tuesday. Who doesn't like Taco Tuesdays, right? So you're trying to cook your tacos for your family and you realize you've run out of ground beef.

If you are a working parent and th...

LIVE at Shoptalk Spring: Wing’s Heather Rivera on Five-Minute Futures

Transcript

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Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
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LIVE at Shoptalk Spring: Wing’s Heather Rivera on Five-Minute Futures

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.