When we first spoke to Hugo, they weren’t looking for flash. Their core business — low-emission last-mile delivery using electric trikes — was already a compelling alternative to city vans. What they needed was a booking experience that matched their product: clean, efficient, and purpose-built for repeat use.
The problem wasn’t delivery,
but everything around it.
Most of Hugo’s customers are small businesses: florists, caterers, independent shops. Their delivery needs are often the same week-to-week, and speed matters. They are small teams where each member wears multiple hats, so spending time to book deliveries should be minimal.
The existing system made quoting, booking and understanding pricing a drawn-out back-and-fourth process over email, sometimes taking days. Customers already liked what Hugo stood for and had to offer, but they had to work really hard to use the service.
“It wasn’t about building something impressive. It was about making something obvious.”
Building trust through transparent pricing
We started by rethinking how quotes were given. Instead of fixed price bands or ballpark estimates, we designed a simple, automated system that breaks down the cost based on three variables:
- Number of drops
- Distance to be travelled
- Total weight of the delivery
These three variables consider real-world conditions that affect how long a rider will be working:
- Each drop takes a few minutes, to park, unload, find the right door, and hand over the parcel before returning to the bike.
- Distance travelled is the obvious one, the rider has to spend time navigating traffic to get to each drop-off location
- Heavy cargo slows down the rider and the bike, lighter cargo allows the bike to go faster.
After the customers enters the pick-up address, drop-offs and weight, the platform automatically optimises the cycling route, and calculates the price based on all the information. Instantly and accuratly. No surprises. No need to get in touch just to check the cost.
The added benefit for customers is that they can see that any far-away addresses are potential outliers that increase the average cost per drop, and they can make a business decision to only deliver closer to home or not.
This level of transparency became a key feature, especially for new customers deciding whether or not to try the service.
Flexible deliveries, shared routes
Taking things a step further, we added the option for customers to choose a flexible delivery time. This small toggle makes a big difference. By giving Hugo the freedom to group flexible orders together that deliver in the same area. The result is fewer trips, lower environmental impact, and shared costs between customers. For those who don’t need their parcel delivered at a precise hour, it’s a simple way to save money and support a smarter kind of logistics.
Copy. Paste. Done.
Where we saw the biggest impact, though, was with repeat customers. A large portion of Hugo’s business involves recurring delivery patterns. More or less the same sets of addresses, with a few new ones, sent out on different days.
So we made rebooking incredibly easy by simply adding a 'copy' button to each drop-off location within a booking, or duplicate any previous booking, edit a few details, and confirm within a couple seconds.
It’s not flashy. It just works. And it's testament of a very obvious truth in product development: if you reduce the effort to complete a task to almost zero, people do it more often.
Since launch, Hugo’s returning customer rate has risen from ~20% to over 80%.
The result isn’t just a better booking tool. It’s a stronger business. One where trust is earned through clarity, and repeat behaviour is built into the design.
Sometimes, the biggest wins don’t come from reinventing the system — but from making everyday actions like copy and paste work a little smarter.
