Beespoke is a London-based community app dedicated to doing things right: placing people back at the heart of the on-demand economy. Beespoke is built with purpose: to connect you with service providers that’ll care after you, your loved ones or your home, the very same way you would.
The Why
“Uber for this, Uber for that…” the rise of one-size-fits-all apps that connect customers with armies of anonymous, independent contractors is paving the way for a dystopian future. We’ve witnessed the birth of a convenience economy of replicable business models, centred around instant gratification and the bottom-line. But dispatching cars or delivering food isn’t the same as providing child care, pet care, or personal training. The models that work for the former two are cruelly unadapted for services that revolve around care, and for which durable relationships between users and service providers should be the norm, not the exception. From where we stand, part of how we got to this unsustainable situation is through the neglect of a few fundamental truths.
The first is that the importance of people in caring after us, our loved ones, and our homes cannot be overstated. Who we want sitting our kids, how we’d like our pets looked after, and what we look for in a personal trainer can be a matter of personal preference. The “Uber for X’s” of the world may be appropriate if you’re looking to get from point A to point B, or your favorite restaurant delivered to your door. But childcare, pet care, fitness or cleaning aren’t commodity services: expectations and needs differ from one customer to another. And it goes both ways: over time, as we get to know our providers and as they get to know us, the quality of care they deliver becomes more personal. More purposeful. It’s fairly obvious, but consistency betters the whole, and is as invaluable to a customer as a customer’s loyalty is to a service professional.
The second is that we rely on word of mouth for all types of decisions, big and small. Hiring decisions are no different. Seeking out friends, colleagues, or fellow alumni for the perfect sitter, cleaner, yoga instructor, or dog walker is a widespread and relatively casual habit. Perusing recommendations from our respective circles of trust helps spread the love, and helps us take informed decisions. But the quest for simplicity leads on-demand apps to ignore this, and to instead favour blind matching of users with random providers. Unsurprisingly, this rather often leads to… the perfect mismatch.
By disregarding the above, online service offerings have sacrificed consistency and quality of care on the customer end, and recognition and job flexibility on the provider side. It’s led to the standardisation of needs, and to the casualisation of labor. And it’s left many of us, and many providers, feeling both dissatisfied and wronged.
In this bleak landscape, we realised the need to contribute a different kind of technology to an industry that has traditionally been entered around people – and which ought to remain that way. A technology that acknowledges that real care is as unique as the person who delivers it. We knew it would take a different kind of company to build it.
Introducing Beespoke. Tune in, and let’s begin.
With Care,
The Beespoke Team
