For a long time we wanted to talk about , a relatively little known brand but that always appeared as highlighted in the rankings of Spanish projects for sale through Amazon, as well asSo we have decided to interview its co-founder and CEO Carlos Fernández. Our idea is to find out how this project was born and how a model that is quite different from the traditional eCommerce that we are used to having in the podcast works.
A business created from Badajoz, focused on electronics but that is opening up to other products such as DIY, stationery and toys. An international project where 70% of its sales depend on Amazon.
Interview with Carlos Fernández (CablePelado)
2:22 Did CablePelado start with Amazon or with its own website?
It started on Amazon, although it had its own website to connect the application. We always sold more on the marketplace than with our own brand. CablePelado started in 2017 with 3 partners, an investment of €9,000, 60 references and an average of 40 orders per day. With this we did not do much, we took an interesting brand and started with Amazon, which guaranteed us sales.
3:25 How did you get into that particular niche?
We wanted a product that would not give many problems and would be cheap for an investment of €9,000 that we had made. In addition, a cable does not generate hardly any returns. We started to have few problems from the beginning and we continue to maintain the mass sale policy, we do not rely on high tickets.
4:58 How was the expansion process?
The name fell short. There came a time when we had all kinds of cables, sizes and colors. Our naming is liked by customers, it is nice and remains in the memory. Our main market is the marketplace, few people who buy from Amazon know that they buy from CablePelado.
We did a market and product study on DIY and toys. We study brands and decisions. There are many shelves that we push back like stationery, which is a world with little margin and very delicate.
10:00 What is the current photo?
We are 11 workers: in the warehouse we have 7 people and 2 in customer service. We are not many for the volume of clients we have. We have few post-sale incidents and the program we use is our own, we use it to adapt to each marketplace every day. With that tool we manage everything.
Last year we invoice 4.2 million euros, and this year we want to double it. In orders, this week we will finish with 450,000. I hope to double the turnover and have double the orders, but it will depend on the latter part of the year. Last year we grew 63%, and this year we are at 40% growth, not bad.
We are in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, and the Czech Republic. We are not in for Brexit, and now we will focus on the main European markets. We want to go to the USA,Amazon offered it to us two months ago, we hope to get there in October because we are very excited.
22:35 Aren’t you afraid to depend so much on Amazon?
The 70% of our sales are from Amazon: where we see that we can be the best, there we will be. Our strategy is to have little margin and a lot of sales. We are profitable from the beginning, we are on Amazon and we have managed to move 2,500 shipments by regular mail without any traceability, for many months and with a small team.
Everything changes, every time something new comes out we adapt. It is not in our plans to make more investments, we were born that way and we will die with our weapons.
30:20 What makes you different?
massive sale, having 3,500 orders a day returns a lot of reviews a day. In addition to our obsession with performance and our concern for the client so that they are satisfied.
Now it is more complicated to start from scratch on Amazon, there is a lot of competition and Amazon’s policies are tougher every day. The algorithm controls much more than before and with few penalties they can close your account.
38:55 Can you think of cases that don’t make sense to go into Amazon?
Fashion in itself it is not strong to sell on Amazon, they do not recommend it, the commissions kill you. On platforms like it’s the other way around. Amazon is number one, everyone wants to be here, but not all projects are interested in entering.
The idea that I like the most to sell are own brand products and work from scratch with a catalog of 50 references. Someone who starts from scratch with their own brand by working on ads and with an interesting product sheet can have a lifetime salary without any problem.
42:50 Any challenge for the future?
This year we are going strong wanting to enter the American market, in addition to entering more marketplaces such as Mediamarkt. We also want to double billing.
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