Super

Origins

My conviction to build Super came when I was a kid. I grew up in my family’s retail business, which served tier 2 cities up to rural areas. I learned that life was unfair in the rural areas compared to the capital city where I grew up. The GDP per capita is over two times higher in the capital city than in the rural areas; however, the prices of goods are two to three times more expensive than in Jakarta (BPS, 2022). The experience of witnessing this injustice in the rural areas compelled me to build Super. Our vision at Super is to democratize the pricing of goods in over 500 tier 2 and tier 3 cities and rural Indonesia. This ensures that rural consumers have access to affordable prices similar to those enjoyed by consumers in Jakarta. As a social commerce platform, Super has made a significant impact in rural Indonesia. We empower agents, including “warung” (micro SMEs) and individual resellers in rural areas, enabling them to become the Walmart of their community by providing affordable prices for their neighbors. Our commitment extends to contributing to technological disruption and fostering economic growth in tier 2 and tier 3 cities and across rural Indonesia. To achieve this, we are dedicated to building our business and core team in the rural areas of Indonesia. First, unlike the norm for start-ups in Indonesia, we established our headquarters (HQ) in East Java in 2018. The first generation of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce juggernauts have operated in Indonesia for over a decade, and investors have poured billions of dollars into their balance sheets. However, they could only capture 7–10% of the offline retail market. In parallel, Indonesia has over 500 second and third-tier cities and rural areas with a much bigger untapped market potential. So, we took a different approach by growing our presence with social commerce online to offline models in \~50 cities across East Java and South Sulawesi. What sets us apart is that we empower community leaders to act as agents, leveraging their social capital and providing technology to sell basic necessities to their friends, allowing them to benefit from the more affordable prices. In the next few years, we will penetrate 450 more tier 2 and tier 3 cities and rural areas in Indonesia. Secondly, the first generation of e-commerce players relies on team members from our capital city, Jakarta. At Super, 95% of our full-time employees are based in rural areas, encompassing key team members across operations, supply chain, business development, and technology. We believe that the hands and minds of rural people can create a unique product experience for rural users, and thus, we trust them to become the backbone of our operations. In addition, we actively promote gender equality in alignment with SDGs. Over the past few years, female team members have grown substantially, resulting in a nearly equal gender composition.