Why Crafty Raised Series A Funding

Looking Back

We launched Crafty with a mission to help companies craft a better workplace by harnessing the power of office food and beverage, whether that’s fostering connectivity or increasing productivity.

We realized that people spend one-third of their lives working, and to no surprise, each generation cares more about the employee experience than the last. The number of companies offering their employees food at work was taking off at a serious clip, and we saw an opportunity to build a centralized platform for workplaces to manage office snacks, drinks and supplies for their teams across the globe.

We set out to disrupt the market for B2B consumption (i.e., food, beverage, supplies, janitorial, etc.) with a technology-enabled, vertically integrated supply chain.  Companies spend over $1T per year in these categories (that's twice as large as the B2B software market!), and the long-time stalwarts in the industry seemed ripe for disruption.  The corporate food service industry has long been dominated by Aramark, Sodexo, and Compass Group, which have conquered the global market.

We launched Crafty in Chicago and expanded into the San Francisco Bay Area, where our approach was inspired by Amazon:  we would develop in-house technology that would allow us to deliver an unrivaled client experience, while also owning fulfillment, end-to-end.  That meant owning inventory, warehouses, delivery vehicles, you name it.  Each new market would require an upfront investment in infrastructure to serve that geography.

When the pandemic hit, our business took a major blow.  While food delivery skyrocketed during COVID, corporate foodservice nosedived.  Large players in our industry were able to rely on their scale to weather the storm, but for many smaller companies, the rough waters of COVID capsized their operations entirely.

We joked that at their core, every industry exists with one fundamental assumption.  For airlines, that assumption is “people travel.”  For restaurants, “people order meals.”  For workplace services, that assumption, before the pandemic, was “people go to work.”  …..whoops!

For a period of time, the outlook for our business was bleak, but our team is resilient, nimble, and imaginative.  We identified a strategic opportunity amidst the toughest challenge we’ve faced as a team, and we emerged with a new business model that allowed us to pivot operations into a more scalable, asset-light platform for in-office and remote teams across the globe. We started operating this business model in January 2021 and grew by over 800% by the end of the year. We went from 2 markets to nearly 30 (6 of which are international!).

Looking Forward

Our vision is to fuel the world’s workforce, which is experiencing its greatest inflection in history.  The way we work is being decomposed and recomposed as every employer incorporates hybrid working models into the physical and digital employee experience.  Crafty is already one of the fastest-moving, agile solutions available in the market.

We will continue investing in ways to help our clients serve their distributed teams.

We launched employee snack boxes with shipping capabilities to deliver office snacks, drinks and supplies as a remote employee perk, a snack and beverage offering for small offices, and also as an employee gifting solution. For remote employees, we provide Crafty Credit, which are virtual dollars that remote employees redeem on snacks, beverages, and work-from-home essentials directly to their homes.

We have a new type of client, our fulfillment partners.

When fulfillment partners work with Crafty, we want their experience to be frictionless.  Our hope is our suite of technology tools can be advantageous in the ways our partners serve both Crafty clients as well as their own.

Together, we are consolidating our scale to take on the largest global players in the corporate foodservice industry.  We believe this approach is different from many notable examples of disruptive tech companies that have left small businesses in their wake. Instead of competing with local players scattered throughout our industry, we are joining forces with them to compete against the industry behemoths, and our goal is to empower their success with our technology across as many aspects of their operations as we can.

Working with family businesses is close to the hearts of our founding team.  We’re proud children of small, family-owned-and-operated businesses, including a small retail store in Pittsburgh, a small party supplies store in Pittsburgh, and a small retail store in Milwaukee.

The Crafty crew currently counts over 200+ people across the US. In addition to our HQ in Chicago, we also have offices in the Bay Area and New York City, as well as remote team members throughout the U.S. With our Series A, we expect our headcount to more than double over the course of the next two years.

We have open roles across the entire business, including engineering, product, sales, marketing, client services, operations, finance, and people operations.