In India, smallholders comprise 78% of the country’s overall farmer base—yet they have little-to-no support reaching their primary markets. By the time these farmers get their produce to market, they’ve paid a third of their sale price solely on transportation.
Our partners at Digital Green launched Loop to help farmers save money and time by orchestrating the logistics of transporting crops to market (think: the Uber pool of transporting produce to market). They later brought IDEO.org in to formalize the user experience and prepare it to scale across villages.
Early on in our research, we realized that the concept of a “service” was not ubiquitous. When local farmers think of a “service,” they think of mail delivery. Farmers rarely knew about Loop, and even people who relied on Loop’s community aggregators (the Loop middlemen who help pool the produce and talk to drivers) didn’t realize the individual aggregators actually belonged to a greater service. Loop would eventually move toward a more self-service, app-based engagement—getting rid of the aggregator role altogether—but in the meantime, they needed to raise awareness of and trust in the service.
We built a brand that would reinforce Loop’s reputability as a service at every single touchpoint. New messaging and visual assets communicate its value to farmers in a three-step process: 1) Harvest produce. 2) Drop it off. 3) Get paid. The team also designed branded shirts and educational tools to help farmers visually connect the individual aggregators to the larger branded ecosystem.
In order to address the fear farmers had of not getting paid, we focused on legitimizing registration, pick up, and drop off moments. New customers received membership IDs with QR codes that were scanned at the pick-up points.
Since our engagement with Loop, brand awareness has grown and the farmer base has gone from 12k to 25k. Month to month, the team at Loop is not only seeing a growth in their farmer customer base, but also more produce transported per farmer (4‑to‑5 trips/month). But beyond productivity, Loop is trying to reimagine the livelihoods of over one million farmers in their network.
