Building and aligning meaningful internal cultures is not just about slogans and rhetoric. At its core, you need to actually produce culture. And there’s something of a formula to cultural production. It involves people identifying with a common and meaningful cultural cause (which often emerges from narratives external to the organization) and then building a social and material context that immerses people into that culture.
In some unique cases, such as at startup organizations, building social and material context literally requires founders to construct something.
At Grit Grocery, I was challenged to develop the resilience and entrepreneurial spirit of a startup culture. That culture wasn’t just a metaphor, we focused on doing. If a team member could think up an idea, and had even meager resources at hand to move it forward, they were encouraged to try. And my role went beyond new ideas. I actually helped build cold storage rooms and got up on ladders to paint the warehouse Grit gray. In customer interactions, we encouraged our team to use their experience in the food world and enthusiasm for our local food cause to guide them in engaging conversations. We tested, iterated, observed, questioned, failed and kept trying some more. Those experiences tangibly demonstrated how to create a unique culture of learning and practice.
Grit required a lot of sweat and hard work. The audacity of building a mobile grocery store on wheels, and sourcing almost entirely locally produced and non-processed food, was both novel and exciting. The brand quickly built an adoring following, thanks to our genuine customer interactions. And Grit was arguably the most Instagram-able food retail experience anywhere.
Challenge
Launching a mobile grocery store out of the founder’s garage. The project required rapidly learning every operation and merchandising system imaginable. From driving trucks and building cold rooms, to developing the brand and curating the right product mix for success.
Approach
A beginner’s mindset and entrepreneurial spirit drove us. We quickly evolved offerings to meet demand. We experimented with new forms constantly, which required a continual process of testing and improving our product.
Methods
Participant-observation
Interviews
Customer Interaction
Market research
Impact
Grit Grocery went from the founder’s garage to up-and-coming business in under a year. We developed a meal bundle offering to rival Blue Apron, and a range of local food offerings that outpaced grocery stores. We created an AI-driven mobile app for meal orders picked up at the truck, tied to a growing social media feed followed by thousands of Houstonians. We also established a loyal fan-following of dedicated Grit customers who engaged with our knowledgeable merchant internal culture—the kind of authentic relationship-building and emotional-driven social movement rarely seen in food retail these days.
Sometimes failure is a teacher. So while Grit Grocery couldn’t sustain the business model in the long run, we learned as much from what didn’t work as what did work. A few lessons included how to stay focused on what’s core to a business, and how to recognize what scales and what doesn’t, or shouldn’t. You can read more about my learnings here at The Ethnographic Mind
