Shopping coupled with Baton Rouge traffic can be a nightmare—especially as the holiday season approaches—but a new delivery service aims to make things easier.
Shop the Area is a new Baton Rouge-area service that lets customers order clothes and other items from their favorite local stores and get them delivered the same day.
Baton Rouge resident Claire Aillet has been working on the service since 2018 and launched Shop the Area in April 2020. The initial launch left a lot to be desired, Aillet says, but her team worked over the next year to add more features and integrate with Shopify, a popular e-commerce company, to make the site more user friendly. The updated site was recently relaunched.
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Customers can currently shop from two local boutiques, Wanderlust by Abby and Addiction Boutique.
The service gets compared to Waitr a lot, Aillet says. Customers can order through either the store or Shop the Area’s website and then pay a delivery fee. Shop the Area gets a message about the delivery, and the item is then delivered to a customer’s doorstep in as little as an hour.
Shop the Area is currently in talks with five other local stores, Aillet says, and could service a total of five Baton Rouge boutiques by the end of this week.
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Shop the Area is also looking to launch its service in New Orleans in January, Aillet says, and is currently working with the boutique Nola Boo.
Shop the Area uses contract drivers to deliver orders, but Aillet is hoping to broaden the employee base when the service expands.
This story originally appeared in the Nov. 5 edition of Daily Report. To keep up with Baton Rouge business and politics, subscribe to the free Daily Report e-newsletter here.