Sarenza.com: 3 million shoes sold in Europe to date

“Italian women pay a lot of attention to luxury brands and labels, a little like French women in Nice, whilst Parisian women particularly emphasise the look and aesthetics of shoes whilst not caring too much about the label”.

So says Stéphane Treppoz, a man who knows about footwear given that he sells them, through Sarenza.com, in France, Britain, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. To date 3 million shoes have been sold through the website. Next stop, shortly, Poland. In 2012 Sarenza will launch a European site .eu which will cover numerous countries including Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal and Ireland.

But what are the other differences between one Country and another and which is the strategy behind an e-commerce company that within six years has opened up for business throughout Europe, reporting a turnover of €80m in 2010, and putting in place a growth of 75% in the first 9 months of 2011? “We were inspired by an American site, Zappos.com, and decided to exploit this model on the European market”, FashionUnited was told by Treppoz, Chairman and Director General of the company with headquarters in Paris. For those who don’t know, Zappos.com is an American company created in 1999, with a turnover, in 2009, of over $1.1bn, the equivalent of 10 million pairs of shoes a year. The company was purchased by Amazon.com in 2010 for $1.2bn. In 2008, three years after its foundation, Sarenza instead refused a purchase offer from Amazon.com

The variety of brands present on the website, about 450, being able to find 15 thousand models of footwear and bags, as well as free delivery are the strong points of Sarenza, a deliberately Italian name, designed to be associated with Italian style, which is appreciated worldwide.

The team of five people following the Italian version of the site and looking after the commercial side are themselves Italian. “We have opened up to the Italian market for about a year now and have people dealing with that from head office in Paris”, adds Treppoz, highlighting that both the commercial part, and the graphical and photographic part are grouped together in the French capital. Same model also for the other Countries: the staff looking after the UK market, for example, are British but working in France.

“Hyper choice and hyper service” are the words management uses to sum up the business model. No discounts compared to shop prices therefore, but the possibility of choosing and purchasing a wide range of brands and models on line. “Periodically, just like all shops really, we have discounts and offers on models from the previous season, but we are only talking about limited sales”, explained Treppoz, stressing that delivery and returns are free irrespective of value and the volume of products bought, and that customers have 100 days to exchange or return any product purchased with a refund in cash or vouchers. All goods, i.e. 20 thousand article codes and 1 million products are warehoused in 18 thousand square metres of logistical platform a few kilometres from Paris.

From our correspondent in Milan