Industry observation | how can home building materials e-commerce achieve sales of more than 600 million euro?

Views:1318 Author:Site Editor Publish Time:2020-07-15 09:50:07 Orgin:Site

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By seizing the opportunity of the shift of home building materials industry to digital direction, manomanomano has grown from a small French start-up company to a European home building materials e-commerce Unicorn with business covering the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain and Belgium, with sales of more than 600 million euro in 2019.

Today, we reviewed the story of manomanomano, and interpreted its business strategy of how to break through the encirclement in the competition with traditional retailers and e-commerce giants, hoping to inspire Chinese entrepreneurs.

Founded in 2012, manomanomano is a French e-commerce platform for selling home DIY, ornaments and horticultural products. After its success in China, manomanomano quickly entered the European market and started business in Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany.

In 2019, manomanomano has 3.5 million active customers, creating a turnover of 620 million euros.

After a comprehensive understanding of the start-up company, we found that it not only hit the blank of market demand, but also gained word-of-mouth among consumers through professional and accurate consulting services. In addition, manomanomano, relying on its technological advantages, has continuously launched innovative services, making it quickly open up the European market.

1、 The birth of Unicorn

Prior to the establishment of manomanomano, founders Philippe de chanville and Christian raisson were colleagues of the same investment fund, focusing on start-ups in the B2C market.

As DIY enthusiasts, they are keenly aware that there is a huge opportunity in the DIY market.

DIY industry has a low degree of digitization and has the opportunity to subvert the industry

Different from food, culture and other industries that have long been combined with digitization, building materials and home furnishing industry has a low degree of digitization, so it is necessary to go to offline stores to purchase goods. The digital platform can help consumers easily obtain purchase suggestions and greater choice space. This is also the development direction of the retail industry in the future.

Online penetration is not high, giants have not yet entered

In 2012, there was no specialized home building materials business website in France, and the industry network penetration rate was less than 1%. Even Amazon did not launch special categories. This is a blue ocean.

After a short trial and error, manomanomano website was officially launched in France in 2013.

This is a home building materials sales platform similar to Taobao. It lists products through the website, and consumers can order and pay on the website. Then the platform will send the order to the seller, and the third-party escrow account will temporarily protect the consumer's payment, and finally the platform will send the order. The whole process platform itself does not undertake any inventory and logistics.

From the beginning, manomanomano had the ambition to become a French market leader. A year later, the company's leaders realized that there were opportunities for improvement in the digital transformation and online services of the home building materials industry across the European market.

Manomano entered the UK market on April 6, 2016. By the end of 2016, they had generated a turnover of 4.4 million pounds, which doubled a year later.

Such stories have been staged in Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium.

In November 2018, manomanomano launched mano fulfillment for specific categories of logistics services in France. The service will further support brand partners selling through the platform and provide first-class logistics services to international customers. The service was launched in Spain in October 2019.

In March 2019, manomanomano launched a platform designed for professionals, manomanomanopro, which aims to provide a convenient channel for building professionals to purchase materials. In operation, the company found that 10% - 15% of the sales are completed by professionals, which is a 200 billion market in Europe.

Currently, about 1800 retailers use manomanomano as a sales channel, with more than 25 million independent visitors per month. The latest company performance report shows that manomanomano will grow by more than 50% in 2019, with sales exceeding 600 million euro for the first time, and the international market (i.e. Spain, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom) accounts for more than one third of sales.

In early 2020, manomanomano received a EUR 125 million round of e-financing. Temasek led the financing, followed by general Atlantic, eurazeo, piton capital, bpifrance and Kismet holdings.

So far, manomanomano has raised a total of 310 million euro in the past six years, becoming a new unicorn in the European home building materials e-commerce market. This also shows the recognition of international investors for the company's business model.

2、 The secret of becoming a unicorn

In the home building materials industry, the competition has always been fierce. Offline, there are old retailers chasing and intercepting, and online e-commerce giants are eyeing.

Manomano opened its own path in the cracks and locked in the position of European leaders. What's the secret behind this?

Aim at market segmentation and carry out differentiated competition

Home building materials products are numerous and miscellaneous. At present, e-commerce mainly focuses on home products. Even for comprehensive e-commerce such as Amazon, the professional level of DIY tools still needs to be improved.

There are two main reasons for this phenomenon: first, professional advice is often needed to purchase DIY tools; second, it is difficult to transport large-scale DIY tools.

Manomano aims at this segment of the market, and has established a professional online platform perpendicular to DIY horticulture, providing a full range of products from screws to flower sheds to compete with e-commerce giants in differentiation.

Innovating platform mode, serving small and medium retailers

Manomano positions itself as an intermediary platform and cooperates directly with third-party retailers instead of doing self-management.

Founder Philippe de chanville said, "the long-term goal is to have 70% distributors and 30% manufacturers on the platform. "With the development of the platform, the platform hopes to have more international brands to join in and drive the growth of the platform through the growth of its partners.

Manomano provides translation and brand communication services for the cooperation. In addition, in order to improve the service level, logistics service is also gradually promoted.

In addition, manomanomano innovates the way of cooperation with retailers. Different from Amazon's "buy box" model, manomanomano only selects one dealer for each product, which can provide more negotiation space, so as to get more competitive prices.

Copy offline experience to online

The inability to get personalized advice like offline stores is a big pain point when buying DIY products online. To address this, manomanomano has created an online community of experts and DIY enthusiasts to recreate the in store experience, allowing shoppers to get personalized advice 7 / 24 hours instead of talking to machine customer service.

Community consultants who provide dialogue services to consumers are called "manodvisors.".

How to become "manodvisors"?

Anyone who is familiar with one of the four themes of DIY, gardening / swimming pool, plumbing / heating, and electricity, and is willing to share his / her technical expertise in exchange for compensation, can apply to become a "manodvisors". After the service's shoppers place an order, manodvisors can get a certain commission.

In 2019, manomanomano users had 1 million conversations with manodvisors, and each chat and call was recorded, classified and saved. Through data analysis, we can better understand the demand changes and optimize the user experience.

3、 Apocalypse of mano mano

The characteristics of heavy experience, difficult decision-making, large products and non-standard features of home building materials industry have been hindering the development of e-commerce platform. In recent years, with the increasing difficulty of offline customer acquisition and the deepening of e-commerce process, home building materials e-commerce has entered a period of rapid development.

According to the statistics of China e-commerce research center, the online penetration rate of home furnishing industry increased from 2.9% to 7.4% from 2014 to 2018, and it is predicted that the growth rate of the whole year in 2019 will increase to 8.5%.

Although, the online growth rate of home building materials has increased year by year, but the penetration rate is not high. This means that the online market of home building materials has a very large space to be further explored, leaving a blue ocean for entrepreneurs.

Manomano, as an early entrepreneur of European home building materials online market, has formed a relatively complete business model through continuous exploration, and has gone out of its own road of success.

What enlightenment does it bring to Chinese home building materials industry entrepreneurs?

Focus on the industry form and seize the opportunity of market gap

Manomano complies with the trend of digital transformation of home building materials industry, cuts into DIY market which has not been occupied by giants, and finally walks out of the road of differentiated competition.

At present, China's home building materials industry has also come to the key point of reform, and the overall direction of digital force, e-commerce live broadcast has just emerged, new channels and new marketing have become the focus of attention in the industry.

When the whole industry feels the stone to cross the river, maybe it is the time when the opportunity comes.

Professional content and professionals are always scarce, which is an important cornerstone to maintain platform traffic

Manomano uses the online community composed of "manodvisors" to provide customers with purchase suggestions, which not only meets the pain points of online shopping experience and lack of service, but also turns every "expert" and every "experience" into the driving force of transforming sales.

At the same time, the community composed of professional content and professionals is also an important channel to aggregate traffic.

Take yidoutang, a consumption decision-making platform for the home furnishing industry, as an example. Most of the early users on the app are home decoration enthusiasts. They publish the content of home decoration strategy on it, which is a typical content community. Later, it gradually attracts more ordinary consumers and home decoration brands to move in.

Due to the large amount of real cases and interactive data deposited on the platform, a bag of sugar has gradually become the shortest and best feedback loop connecting b-end manufacturers and C-end consumers in the home furnishing industry.

Through the above practical experience, we can see that the mode of gathering traffic based on professional skills and experience is more cost-effective and long-term sustainable.

Value of technology in digital transformation

Manomano insists that it is a technology platform, not an e-commerce site.

The fastest growing company is the recruitment of IT personnel, more than half of its employees are technical personnel. And, no matter what position, you should receive SQL programming training. This ensures that everyone has the ability to solve the problems they encounter in their daily work.

In an interview with the media, VP growth & data maximum de Baillon of manomanomano said that there are two major assets that will determine the future of manomanomano.

First, it is firmly technology-oriented and wants to create its own solutions. Second, it exists in an industry that is transforming to digital.

Whether it is traditional or emerging industries, technology plays an increasingly prominent role in the process of digital processing and process optimization, which is the cornerstone of digital transformation.