Tienda Cerca

01 Background

The pandemic hit neighbourhood shopkeepers (tenderos) hard. In Colombia they make up around 40% of convenience stores. What kept them going was their relationship with the street, not logistics.

02 Brief

Build a digital platform for tenderos that didn’t repeat the OXXO mistake: scaling convenience at the cost of the relationships that make local shops work.

03 Solution

Research with tenderos and shoppers showed the gap was emotional. Tenderos saw their shops as family, not inventory, and people bought from them out of trust, not just speed.

We built customer profiles and value propositions for both groups, and benchmarked Rappi, Wabi and Merqueo to find where Tienda Cerca could stand apart instead of fighting on logistics. The positioning moved to human connection at scale. B2B, B2C… H2H.