Gorillas: groceries in ten minutes, and the questions the promise raised

Gorillas was founded in Berlin in 2020 by Kağan Sümer with a simple offer: order everyday groceries on an app and have them at your door in as little as ten minutes. The company ran its own small urban warehouses, so-called dark stores, and employed its riders directly, sending them out on branded e-bikes. In March 2021, a few months after launch, it raised 290 million dollars at a valuation above one billion. In October 2021 a round of close to one billion dollars, led by Delivery Hero, valued it at about 3.1 billion.

The same year showed the strain. In June 2021 riders in Berlin walked out after a colleague was dismissed, and in October dozens of riders were fired after wildcat strikes that shut several warehouses; the company said German law did not protect strikes that a union had not called. In May 2022 Gorillas cut about 300 jobs, left Italy, Spain, Denmark and Belgium, and said it was moving from hyper growth to a path to profitability. In December 2022 the Turkish rival Getir agreed to buy it, in a deal the Financial Times put at about 1.2 billion dollars. In April 2024 Getir announced it was leaving Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States to concentrate on Turkey.

A benefit everyone understood at once

As a promise, ten minutes was close to ideal. It was concrete, measurable and easy to repeat, and nobody needed an explanation of why it was good. On the Promise Ladder it was a clean solution promise, the second rung: a functional problem, solved fast.

The trouble with a promise like that is how it lands. In the books, benefits are perceived in layers, functional, emotional and rational, and the rational layer tends to arrive last, to justify a choice the feelings have already made. A functional benefit pitched very high makes people ask who is paying for it. Ten minutes for a carton of milk invites the obvious follow-ups: who is cycling that fast through the city, on what pay, and how can a small delivery fee cover a warehouse, a rider and the stock? Customers normally never think about any of that. Here the promise itself put those questions on the table.

The counterweight was public

In Gorillas’ case, the answers appeared in the news while the brand was still young. The strikes and dismissals of 2021 were covered across Europe, and they gave a face to the cost the customer had started to suspect. A value proposition reads as balanced when each party seems to get something fair from it. This one looked tilted towards the customer, and every report about rider conditions tilted it further.

The books read the root problem as a badly built hierarchy of benefits: one functional advantage, pushed to the limit as the brand’s only strength, with no emotional or relational value to give it weight. Ten minutes was the entire proposition. Once it became a reason for doubt, there was nothing else for customers to hold on to.

When speed is the whole moat

The economics told a similar story from the inside. Speed is easy to copy for anyone with enough capital, so Gorillas, Getir and other rivals raced each other city by city, and the only defence was spending more. When funding tightened in 2022, the gap between what the promise cost and what customers would pay for it became impossible to finance, and consolidation followed. A promise that a competitor can match with money belongs to the market more than to the company.

The lesson reaches well beyond quick commerce. Before you raise a functional benefit as high as it will go, ask what customers will wonder about once they hear it, and make sure the answer is one you are glad to show them. A promise built on one number needs other values around it, so that a doubt about the number does not become a doubt about the whole company.

If your offer rests on a single benefit everyone understands, train your team to test what that benefit makes customers ask next.