22
de Desembre
de
2016
Act.
22
de Desembre
de
2016
Quadrupling the estimated turnover for the year in only six months would be a dream for any company. Meller has managed it. The Catalan brand of sunglasses and watches set up by the entrepreneurs and fellow graduates Sergi Benet, Borja Nadal and Marco Grandi has triumphed in less than two years on the market.
Meller is a brand of sunglasses and watches sold through social media. "We are a company that is native to the Internet, we were born online and we are totally digital," says the brand's cofounder. This allowed the brand to end 2015 with a turnover of 500,000 euros, while the forecast for 2016 of 2 million euros was reached in the first six months of the year. In very little time the Catalan firm has achieved "exponential growth", something that leads its creators to forecast that Meller will end the year having done business worth 6 million euros, some 150% more than what was estimated at the start of 2016.
The initial idea came out of a Malaysian incubator "that rejected the project because being an individual brand implies high costs in marketing, promotion, image, etc, and it was too much of a risk for them," says the entrepreneur. So they returned to the Catalan capital. "We arrived at a very bad time for us because we had tried to get into the Australian market and it didn't work out well; we didn't know enough about digital marketing and spent all the money we had."
They then knocked on the door of the Conector accelerator of Barcelona Activa. In May 2014, Meller was already on the market and achieved a turnover of 45,000 euros. Since then, the growth has been meteoric. And basically just with sunglasses and watches.
Smart fashion
And how has this happened? Benet says that Meller is based on smart fashion. That means that the brand offers high quality products at a more "affordable" price than what is normally the case because "being online facilitates doing without intermediaries that adds costs to the value chain." Meller's products go directly from the factory to the consumer and "do not incur additional expenses for the client." Sunglasses and watches are accessories that do not have sizes and that are closely linked to fashion and trends, which makes them products that are perfectly adaptable to e-commerce.
At the beginning, Meller broke the trend for budget sunglasses at the time, which were completely square-shaped. Rounded sunglasses came into fashion and there was no one making them at such low prices. Now, among the 22 employees who make up the staff, are designers who come up with their own designs.
However, apart from being an innovative idea, achieving these results also required investment in marketing. Meller has this year devoted more than a million euros to promoting itself online.
This has been a key move in a market in which there is a lot of competition: "There might be a bubble in sunglasses brands after the success of Hawkers, but a great many don't make it or are very small projects," Benet points out. The sunglasses market does not have "many barriers to entry, anyone can come up with a brand and sell a product line," but in the end only those who do things well can become a large company, if not "it merely pays the employees' salaries."
A global brand
The brand with the name of an African chameleon is to be found all over Europe "because there are increasingly fewer barriers and it costs us the same to send our products to Finland as to France." The international market will at the end of the year make up about 75% of Meller's turnover. In Benet's opinion, this growth is due to the firm expanding to new European countries, although he does add that to continue growing at this pace they will have to try the markets of Latin America, North America and Australia again, taking advantage of the southern hemisphere summer.
As for the future, Meller has set the objective of growing in the markets it is already part of and opening new ones to, in the end, become a global brand. Consolidating the brand will also perhaps lead to the products becoming available in physical shops in the near future. "We want to create a solid brand people like and that does things well, that's all," Benet concludes.
Meller is a brand of sunglasses and watches sold through social media. "We are a company that is native to the Internet, we were born online and we are totally digital," says the brand's cofounder. This allowed the brand to end 2015 with a turnover of 500,000 euros, while the forecast for 2016 of 2 million euros was reached in the first six months of the year. In very little time the Catalan firm has achieved "exponential growth", something that leads its creators to forecast that Meller will end the year having done business worth 6 million euros, some 150% more than what was estimated at the start of 2016.
The initial idea came out of a Malaysian incubator "that rejected the project because being an individual brand implies high costs in marketing, promotion, image, etc, and it was too much of a risk for them," says the entrepreneur. So they returned to the Catalan capital. "We arrived at a very bad time for us because we had tried to get into the Australian market and it didn't work out well; we didn't know enough about digital marketing and spent all the money we had."
They then knocked on the door of the Conector accelerator of Barcelona Activa. In May 2014, Meller was already on the market and achieved a turnover of 45,000 euros. Since then, the growth has been meteoric. And basically just with sunglasses and watches.
Smart fashion
And how has this happened? Benet says that Meller is based on smart fashion. That means that the brand offers high quality products at a more "affordable" price than what is normally the case because "being online facilitates doing without intermediaries that adds costs to the value chain." Meller's products go directly from the factory to the consumer and "do not incur additional expenses for the client." Sunglasses and watches are accessories that do not have sizes and that are closely linked to fashion and trends, which makes them products that are perfectly adaptable to e-commerce.
At the beginning, Meller broke the trend for budget sunglasses at the time, which were completely square-shaped. Rounded sunglasses came into fashion and there was no one making them at such low prices. Now, among the 22 employees who make up the staff, are designers who come up with their own designs.
However, apart from being an innovative idea, achieving these results also required investment in marketing. Meller has this year devoted more than a million euros to promoting itself online.
This has been a key move in a market in which there is a lot of competition: "There might be a bubble in sunglasses brands after the success of Hawkers, but a great many don't make it or are very small projects," Benet points out. The sunglasses market does not have "many barriers to entry, anyone can come up with a brand and sell a product line," but in the end only those who do things well can become a large company, if not "it merely pays the employees' salaries."
A global brand
The brand with the name of an African chameleon is to be found all over Europe "because there are increasingly fewer barriers and it costs us the same to send our products to Finland as to France." The international market will at the end of the year make up about 75% of Meller's turnover. In Benet's opinion, this growth is due to the firm expanding to new European countries, although he does add that to continue growing at this pace they will have to try the markets of Latin America, North America and Australia again, taking advantage of the southern hemisphere summer.
As for the future, Meller has set the objective of growing in the markets it is already part of and opening new ones to, in the end, become a global brand. Consolidating the brand will also perhaps lead to the products becoming available in physical shops in the near future. "We want to create a solid brand people like and that does things well, that's all," Benet concludes.