Bringing the hotel home
Home concierge service Butler delivers the hotel experience to your apartment, including bouquets and fine wine delivery
What inspired you to set up Butler?
We saw that there was a need for a trusted home service in the city. As investment bankers, we were used to working long hours and bosses calling us at midnight or 7pm on a Sunday night, and it was frustrating to spend downtime on chores and housework. Finding good quality, reliable staff was down to luck, and communication isn’t always straightforward when you want someone to clean your home. Then if you need to do something like get your wifi fixed, you have to talk to someone else, and relay all your personal information, tell firms how to find your home and so on so it’s very time-consuming. We were willing to pay a premium but still couldn’t always find the right people. Working long hours makes you realise how important home is for your lifestyle and health when work is stressful. We want to help people elevate their lifestyle.
What services do you offer clients?
Our core services are housekeeping, laundry and closet management, grocery resupply and food preparation but we can arrange everything from an aircon deep clean to bouquet deliveries. We’re very lifestyledriven based on seasons – we do Christmas tree delivery and red banner writing for Chinese New Year, for example.
You’ve referred to yourselves as Batman’s Alfred or Ironman’s Jarvis. Which one is most accurate?
The traditional meaning of a Butler is someone wearing a nice suit, black tie and carrying a silver plate – Alfred is a very good depiction. We started off with the concept of Alfred, but we’re modern-day butlers using tech to empower our staff and clients, so that makes us more Jarvis. Technology is ultimately the future – we love the convenience of it but want to provide a personal, human touch to our service. Uber and Deliveroo used tech to revolutionise taxi service and home delivery, and we’re doing the same with the home.
You have an app. How does it work?
It’s all about convenience, so you can see what’s going on with your home at a glance. There’s a booking system, a summary list detailing what’s been cleaned & sanitised and so on, a payment wallet and a suggestion function where clients can note down how to improve our service. We also have a WhatsApp chat linked to our app so clients can talk to our home concierge team directly.
There are plans to upgrade the app in the second quarter of this year and offer easier access to value-added services, like instantly buying flowers for Valentine’s Day. We’ll make the booking system and the wallet more user-friendly, too.
Butler Club members can subscribe to monthly packages. Tell us about that
We have green (HK$2,500/month for 14 hours), silver (HK$3,500 for 21 hours) and gold (HK$4,500/month) tiers. People try the entry level tier first, but a lot of them end up upgrading, or top up by a few hours. Members can also access some perks via the monthly subscription plans, such as access to rare wines at wholesale prices.
With people confined largely to their homes for more than a year, have you seen more interest in your services?
With people staying at home for so long now, there’s certainly been a change of mindset and greater importance placed on home lifestyle. Overall, it’s been very positive and our retention rate is above 90 percent.
What were some of the challenges of setting up Butler?
I think the biggest obstacle was people not believing in us. We had a lot of rejections and people doubting us, so you do end up thinking, ‘are we wasting our time?’ In the beginning, we were both working in investment banking full time, so it was very tiring. We’d leave work at 8pm, then work until 12am, go back to work, and Angues had to be at work for 4am! What kept us going was having the same vision, and we kept thinking eventually we’ll get there. It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster ride at times. One day, we might have some terrible news, then by the end of day, we’d be on top of the world.
James Riley, group chief executive of the Mandarin Oriental, is a shareholder & mentor. How has he helped you?
We met him around 18 months ago when he was speaking at a lunch event. He found the idea of transporting the hotel experience to the home an intriguing idea, so we grabbed a coffee, had more meetings, and now meet once a month. He’s helped us prepare for negotiations with corporate clients like Swire and New World Development and introduced us to his network.
What are your plans for Butler over the next 12 months?
There still needs to be a lot of education around the concept of home concierge. But we remain hopeful. People were initially sceptical about Airbnb and staying in a random stranger’s house, after all.
What are your long-term hopes for the business?
Hong Kong is a blueprint – we want to be a global company and hope to duplicate the Butler experience in other cities, like Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok and Taipei as well as Singapore, even London. We want to make people realise the importance of their home, and make coming home the highlight of their day, an instant stress reliever. butlerasia.com