The shopping trolley is dead. It’s not just bobbing around in a London canal, but buried under a pile of shifting shopping trends. Online shopping is arguably the biggest suspect with 45% of people using it.

With online grocery shopping valued at £12.3bn, none of this should really be a surprise, our streets are flooded by countless delivery vans, working tirelessly in the name of our convenience.

The status quo is far from perfect, with missed deliveries or waiting around at home now the norm. Many of us have had to rush back for a forgotten delivery, postpone our plans (or not make any in the first place), all those unforeseen times you’ve worked late and the spontaneous lunch with friends that never happened.

In the U.S. those issues are currently being put to bed with companies disrupting the market further. AmazonKey not only enables you to receive deliveries when out and about, it works seamlessly with Alexa giving the user the total smart home experience. Privacy advocates look away now. Even Walmart launched InHome Delivery, filling your fridge with fridgetopia whilst you’re off doing something (literally anything) more exciting.

Enter While You’re Away, Waitrose’s own take on the stateside success of Amazon and Walmart – the natural evolution of grocery shopping. Innovation was how Amazon exploded, could Waitrose step on their patch?

Waitrose’s challenge was two fold, not only was it launching a service that was a UK first to market, of which many have failed before, but they were launching it whilst constantly reassuring the customer that this service could be trusted (we don’t usually let strangers into our home). All of which was backed up with the quality that Waitrose is synonymous with.

John Lewis Ventures came to us to unpack and understand their product, one that comes with all the new to market teething issues – is it actually deliverable in a market of ever increasing consumer demands, will the customer not only want it, but need it, giving it long term viability?

So, we dissected the process, looked at how the user journey worked from click to delivery and gained a unique insight into how shoppers habits and demands are rapidly changing. Once we’d wrapped our collective heads around this challenge, and fuelled with the obligatory tea and biscuits, we’d scripted, storyboarded, art directed and produced a video worth shouting about.

Communicating the end to end journey, the video supports the website enabling Waitrose to convert customers to the next phase in frictionless grocery shopping. Not only did existing customers trust the service, but converted people from outside Waitrose’s usual reach via invaluable word of mouth.

The shopping trolley will be missed, but we’re more interested about the smart solutions left in it’s wake. Still in it’s infancy, it could challenge what the next generation see as shopping and blur the line further between company and consumer.