Trader Joe's $22K Catalog

A story about how Instacart creatively built their initial product catalog for Trader Joe's.

"In the early days of the company, we didn't have partnerships with grocery stores. We would just go into stores and shop like regular customers. The problem was we didn't have good information on what the stores actually carried.

We started going into Trader Joe's trying to write down information of all the items and take pictures of everything to build our website. They would ask what we were doing, and I would say 'oh nothing' and then they'd kick us out of the store.

Eventually, we came up with a better idea. We went to the store manager and said 'Hey my name is Max, I'm here to buy one of everything in your store.' They said 'You're going to do what?' We asked them to open a check stand for us for the day, and they did.

We bought one of everything in the entire store, took pictures of all of it over the course of 3 days. It takes 3 days to take 3,000 pictures, but after that we had a catalog. It cost us about $1,000 dollars, and looking back, it would have been better to just give people money to order, but we kept trying different ideas until we found ones that worked."