After 10 years, Chuchesonline is Funtastyc, an eCommerce based in Granada that sells candy, personalized gifts and party items online. In the process of chatting with Frank NavarroeCommerce Manager, which in this new stage launches three domains to consolidate its market in Spain and climb positions in the rest of Europe.
In episode seven of the we analyze the communication and positioning challenges of an online brand change.
Interview with Fran Navarro (Funtastyc)
02:13 Introduce us to the company and tell us about your role in Funtastyc.
We are a company from Granada, a wholesale warehouse with 50 years of history. The eCommerce project started a decade ago as Chuchesonline.com. The company already had the product and saw on the Internet a new way to market it. This year we celebrate our tenth anniversary, and now we are Funtastyc. I practically arrived at the beginning, when eCommerce had barely been running for a year. Professionally I have grown with the project, which has seven people in the online department.
03:23 Now you are in a renaming process, but what is the history of the original name, Chuchesonline?
It came about as a result of brainstorming. After considering several alternatives, including a local name such as ‘chuchesgranada’, this was chosen, in order to show the essence of the project. We are candy wholesalers of all life, and what was intended was to sell the baubles over the Internet.
04:26 What happened so that after 10 years you considered this change?
When we had been with eCommerce for a few years, we realized that we could have other synergies and the world of the party gave us a lot of strength. We start to introduce other products that complemented the originals: piñatas, garlands, disposable tableware… There came a time when we no longer only sold sweets. We have a very wide catalog of products to set up parties and sweet tables.
05:19 Was the maturation of the product something that you did only digitally or was it also changing in the original wholesale warehouse?
It has gone hand in hand. Everything that we were seeing that was a trend and that we could take to our online catalog was also incorporated into our wholesale warehouse. In addition, in the physical store we began to serve individuals, which we did not do before. People asked us and we made one offline strategy to incorporate B2C as a commercial activity. Now, in addition to the warehouse, we have a store with its shelves, its checkout line; a hybrid between wholesale and retail, with bags of sweets in bulk and party items. We dispense with the pallets of the warehouses and opt for a more careful display.
07:01 How did the new name: Funtastyc come about?
It came about because we have a brand that is dreamfactory, which we use for personalized products. There they made us a proposal to use Funtastyc although, in the end, it was not used. They didn’t like the concept so much that we began to think about the possibility of taking it to eCommerce. The idea of fun like the fun of yummy like tasty and the final combination of the word, like something fantasticit was love at first sight for the whole team, so we started working on that new name.
Funtastyc is more global, it gives us much more play. It is a more powerful brand and offers us greater scalability on an international level. fun Y yummy They are simple, common words, nothing farfetched, and at the product level they represent a much broader range.
08:35 What steps have you had to take organically? Because it’s not just about changing the domain.
From the outset, we had to configure all the 301 redirects necessary, something basic. Now we are working all SEO strategy globally. In the coming months we have to enhance organic positioning. And while, in Google Ads we keep many campaigns active that we already had up and running with Chuchesonline. We are in the process of adaptation.
We have just made the definitive change and we are crossing our fingers not to have to strengthen the brand from scratch. We expect a certain drop but we are informing the beast of the new brand so that customers recognize us. From the point of view of the we have also initiated some actions in order to somewhat mitigate the fall.
10:05 Assuming that you will temporarily lose some SEO, do you value reinforcing the investment in SEM?
At least the first months we will have to make more investment. Furthermore, we look for the recurrence of customers who already know us by attacking the database so that pass orders and go back to buy in the store.
We already started the communication of the name change at Christmas. We started by announcing that in 2019 we will be 10 years old and that some surprises awaited us. In February we made the first official communication and now we have completed all the changes, also of profiles in . From the point of view of a 360º communicationwe have very complicated actions underway.
11:29 You were referring to the newsletters. How often do you send them?
We are not usually very aggressive: we normally make a couple of monthly communications. Now we have just released one announcing the change and we have another one in hand to confirm that the change has already occurred. We will soon see if we need any more reinforcement because it is true that, from the outset, the name may be a handicap because of Chuchesonlinewhich is a simple name, to FuntastycWe know that it will cost us a bit.
12:35 With Chuchesonline you already had an international presence. How did you manage it?
All our international traffic came through Chuchesonline.com, but it was rather residual. With this change we propose a more forceful plan. In Portugal we already entered with a defined strategy, for the rest of the international we are going to attack with the .com, and for Spain we reserve the .es. Right now we have three different domains. The .pt for Portugal, the .es for Spain and the .com we leave for the rest of Europe.
13:25 Having three domains and positioning all three at the level of communication and SEO requires an extra effort.
It’s complicated but it was already difficult with the .com, because we didn’t have it fully translated. Now, we are in the process of completing the .pt with the product descriptions, and we already have the .com page defined. We are going to try to position it, also with the help of Google Ads, at the beginning.
14:42 Since you began to communicate the change in December, how has it been received? What feedback are you receiving?
We are happy because there are several clients who have told us that they have loved the change. Also we have renewed the version of and the people who are entering the web say that they like the new features of eCommerce in addition to the brand. We have restructured the catalogue, that is already visible, but we have new developments that we will be launching little by little from now on.
15:58 Do you have in mind to measure the process in some way?
We have our own tool for customers to rate us, so we will be very attentive to what they tell us, because they usually offer a lot of information that way. Later we plan to do a survey. But it would have to be very bad feedback to backtrack.
Being a digital brand we also understand that people are going to search on Google. Before it came out Chuchesonline and now it’s going to come out Funtastyc. It shouldn’t be a big problem either. Also, the Chuchesonline brand will be accompanying Funtastyc for quite a few monthsso we hope that this will help the customer to get used to the new brand.
17:22 As far as you can tell us, how big is your eCommerce?
We are not one of the largest, but we have a lot of daily traffic. Every day around 100 expeditions leave. We are a medium eCommerce. Our market is fundamentally in Spain. Portugal has been the fruit of a sought-after natural growth because it is very close. It is a smaller market and it is like Spain a few years ago: people are still afraid to use the card, they use , a payment platform that forces you to go through an ATM… But it is a market that is beginning to yield results.
You can subscribe to at:
Stay informed of the most relevant news on our news channel
Facebook Comments
Disqus