Système U makes the new school year easier!

To make the new school year easier, Système U has set up a dedicated U-Rentrée online site, allowing parents to order a personalised package, containing the exact list of school supplies for each class, before picking it up in-store. To do this, the company has obtained the official lists from 125 secondary schools in France and integrated them into the website.

So all parents have to do, is choose the city, the school, and the class and subjects in question, to see the package on offer. Then, they choose the number of items they want and add additional supplies if necessary. Of course, the brand is committed to selecting products and brands with the best value for money.

Then :

Orders will then be prepared at a warehouse and shipped to a store for collection or drive-through service, starting on the 25th of August, a few days before the new school year!

The only drawback is that not all parents can benefit from this handy service, because only 41 stores will be offering this service. A first test for Système U before a wider rollout in 2019?

Système U is not the first brand to offer this service which is so useful for time-pressed parents. Carrefour has already offered it before, in 2015, but it doesn’t seem to have become widespread. Perhaps it’s not that easy to obtain school supplies lists from schools?

Other brands such as Container Store (which sells storage boxes) in the United States have chosen to provide online “checking” files

In any case, the U-Rentrée service is very useful because it addresses two important drivers for families, FACILITATION and REALISATION. The FACILITATION driver is intimately linked to two constraints weighing on many households: chronic lack of time, and increasingly stretched budgets. These families are therefore the target of this service, which allow them to save precious time and purchasing power. The second driver is REALISATION: it’s about supporting families in significant points in their lives. And the new school year is one of them!

Last but not least, this service is part of the new French customer experience. According to the latest figures from Access Panel 2018, drive-through shopping is steadily gaining ground. 16% of French people use this service for their food shopping (+3 percent compared to 2014). Of course it’s not aimed at all consumers, but it does allow a certain target customer to have a shopping experience that matches their expectations.