Anne Delaigle, co-founder of IzzyTown Becycle: “Logistics must be taken into account in downtown planning policies”

All roads lead to logistics. For Anne Delaigle, now CEO of IzzyTown BeCycle, it began with making women’s clothing from lamb leather. For nearly 30 years, she sold her designs to various ready-to-wear stores. Then came the Covid crisis. “Independent retailers, who were my clients, emerged from it weakened, she recalls. And at that point, just after the lockdown ended, Lyon city hall announced that certain downtown streets would be pedestrianized, without consultation and without planning alternatives so that stores could receive deliveries. I then wondered whether we would be able to make it through.” Stuck in a crowded parking garage because these traffic routes had been closed, the Lyon native came up with a service that stores could offer customers who could no longer drive into downtown. “In 2023, I launched IzzyTown: we handle delivery to consumers of the various purchases they have made in several stores, Anne Delaigle explains. We offer a practical service that lets people shop with their hands free. The idea is to encourage people to visit stores, make their stroll as easy and effortless as possible, and thus promote downtown commerce.”

After being collected from the various stores, goods are consolidated at IzzyTown’s 400-square-meter facility in Lyon’s 7th arrondissement, then delivered by bicycle or electric vehicle within two hours of purchase—or the next day, depending on customer demand—to homes, workplaces, hotels, anywhere in Lyon and in 70 surrounding municipalities. “In 2024, we acquired BeCycle, the cargo-bike transport company we had worked with from the outset, through court-supervised liquidation proceedings, Anne Delaigle adds. A very important detail for me is that the 32 delivery workers are IzzyTown BeCycle employees. This enables us to guarantee good working conditions, unlike those working as self-employed contractors.”

In 2025, IzzyTown reported revenue of €1.3 million and now has nearly 80 partner stores downtown—florists, pharmacies, fashion, home-decor and restaurant businesses—and has expanded the services it offers retailers by collecting waste (cardboard, paper, plastic and green waste). “We take it to our facility so that it can be recycled and recovered, through a partnership with Paprec for cardboard, plastic and paper, and with Racine for green waste, the executive explains. For the time being, we ship this waste to the disposal outlet two to three times a week, but the lack of space and land available for logistics activities downtown will lead us to do so even more often.” According to Anne Delaigle, Urban Logistics Hotels located several kilometers from the city center will not solve the challenges facing retailers and logistics providers. “Small logistics spaces are needed in every arrondissement, so that low-emission mobility can be used, she insists. I am not opposed to pedestrianization as such, nor to policies aimed at reducing pollution. But it must be done with common sense and without dogmatism.”

Following this Lyon initiative, which has been underway for three years, IzzyTown BeCycle is considering expanding to other French cities. “We would like to expand nationwide, in downtown areas currently being pedestrianized and ideally with populations of more than 50,000,” Anne Delaigle says. “But the fact that we employ our delivery workers and have to pay increasingly expensive rents downtown makes things difficult.” Committed in all that she does, Anne Delaigle is on Jean-Michel Aulas’s electoral list for the March 2026 municipal elections and is also the spokesperson for Défenseurs de Lyon, a collective bringing together companies, retailers and associations opposed to how the pedestrianization of the Presqu’île is currently being carried out. In this capacity, she continually warns of the risks of urban policies conducted without dialogue with retailers, local residents and logistics companies. “If we do not prepare for and support this change, retailers—particularly independent ones—will face another crisis after the Yellow Vests movement and Covid. They will no longer have the means to withstand it and will leave. In the end, we will be left only with major chains, which are better able than independent retailers to wait for consumer habits to change.”