Zebeth Media Solutions

Commerce

Alibaba eyes logistics growth in LatAm as China commerce slows • ZebethMedia

Cainiao, the logistics arm of Alibaba, is traveling far from home to seek expansion for its business. The company recently launched its first parcel distribution center in Brazil, adding to its regional network of sorting centers in Mexico and Chile, it said Monday. Alibaba’s e-commerce business in China has been hurt by a combination of a cooling economy and aggressive rivals like Pinduoduo. For the first time, the firm didn’t disclose the sales tally for its annual “Singles Day” shopping festival, which fell on November 11 and used to come with a Super Bowl-like gala featuring pop idols and Jack Ma himself. Cainiao has been following AliExpress abroad, helping the Alibaba-owned cross-border marketplace deliver Chinese goods to consumers around the world. But it’s now ramping up domestic services in some countries, hoping to turn local retailers into its clients. Earlier this year, the logistics giant began providing express courier service in Brazil, which now spans over 1,000 cities. The new facility in Brazil is slated to further boost Cainiao’s presence in the country. The plan is to open nine more distribution centers in seven states and set up 1,000 “smart lockers” across ten cities over the next three years. Smart lockers, which let customers pick up their e-commerce packages, have become a common sight in China. It saves couriers from running up and down buildings to deliver to people’s doorstep and helps reduce human contact during COVID-19 times. In Brazil, Cainiao aims to use the infrastructure for intra-city and cross-border logistics services as well as food delivery in the future. One of Cainiao’s smart locker clients is Piticas, a retail franchise focused on geek and pop culture products. “Our consumers can shop online and receive their parcels in a few days. In the future, we look forward to cooperating with Cainiao to utilize its smart lockers, which gives our customers more options for pick-up, as well as imports from China to Brazil, further increasing the efficiency of our supply chain,” said Vinicius Rossetti, CEO of Piticas, in a statement. Cainiao also wants to help Brazilian merchants export goods like coffee, nuts, and propolis to China, reversing the traditional trade route. The company currently operates eight weekly chartered flights between China and Brazil and plans to add more air and sea routes between the countries. In July, Cainiao opened its sorting center in Israel, bringing the number of its overseas sorting centers in use to ten at the time. As of June, Cainiao had more than 7,700 smart lockers in operation in Europe. The logistics unit accounted for roughly 5.6% of Alibaba’s revenues in the three months ended June.

Zenlytic develops commerce-specific, self-serve business intelligence tool • ZebethMedia

Zenlytic, a business intelligence tool for commerce, secured $5.4 million in seed funding to continue developing its natural-language interface for non-technical users who want to corral their customer acquisition, conversion and retention software into one tool without needing a data team. Bain Capital Ventures led the round and was joined by other investors, including Primary Venture Partners, Correlation Ventures, Company Ventures, Habitat Partners (Red Antler) and the Sequoia Scout Fund. As my colleague Kyle Wiggers wrote earlier this year, business intelligence is getting some love from venture capital firms as the category yields more solutions for managing and analyzing large amounts of data so customers can identify new revenue opportunities. However, Ryan Janssen, co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, is out to turn business intelligence on its head by doing something he believes the industry says it’s doing but has never really delivered — true self-serve capabilities. Prior to starting the company, Janssen and co-founder Paul Blankley were data scientists consulting with commerce brands on how to use data and noticed that no matter the size, they had similar issues. “One of the biggest ironies is they have a wealth of data to make decisions, but because their core product is not tech, they generally have smaller tech teams, are late to develop tech teams,” Janssen told ZebethMedia. So they set out to build their own take on business intelligence with Zenlytic, what he described as a true self-service tool specifically designed for commerce companies. Users can unite all of their customer acquisition, conversion and retention SaaS tools into one cloud data warehouse and access customizable analytics. “Unreliable data is worse than no data at all,” Janssen added. “Brands need customer logic, but today’s tools are typically one-size-fits-all. Our tech unlocks better self-serve by rolling up natural language capabilities powered by GPT-3 and OpenAI to make it feel like you are having a conversation with an internal data person.” The $5.4 million in new funding is spread across two rounds, including one that happened about two years ago and the other one, led by Scott Friend, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, this year. Friend told ZebethMedia that commerce is one of the core focuses of the firm and he spent most of his career in commerce analytics. While looking for new software companies helping brands do things they couldn’t do before, he found Zenlytic and saw that it was doing something that he had recognized a need for, but could not find. “We didn’t have nearly the brilliance of Ryan and Paul, but did think there needed to be a self-serve way for people to ask questions about their business data without having to hire an analytic team,” Friend said. “We stumbled into Zenlytic and when we saw versions of the product, we were blown away by their idea of being able to ask a question and have the machine do all the analysis. That is a dream for people running brands.” Meanwhile, Zenlytic is very much still in its early stages, so there wasn’t much to report on traction, according to Janssen, and much of the funding will go into expanding the company’s team as it moves toward being a product-led business. He expects the company to triple its team of four people in the next year as it adds more product and analytics folks to develop additional capabilities.

Klarna brings its price comparison tool to Europe • ZebethMedia

Klarna is expanding into the competitive world of price comparisons, with the launch of a new tool that compares prices across thousands of retailers. The company quietly rolled out the price comparison service in the U.S. a few weeks back, and is now extending this into additional markets in Europe including The U.K. and the Nordics. The European “buy now, pay later” fintech has had a turbulent year, laying off 10% of its workforce in May followed by a second round of layoffs in September. Sandwiched in between, news emerged that Klarna had raised $800 million in funding, albeit at a valuation 85% lower than the previous year, a trend that has echoed elsewhere across the fintech sphere and beyond. With today’s announcement, Klarna is building on an acquisition that closed just six months ago, when it snapped up comparison shopping service PriceRunner in a $124 million deal. At the time, it said that it would use the acquisition to power new features in the core Klarna app, including produce search and price comparisons — and that is what it has been rolling out over the past few weeks. It’s a notable expansion for Klarna, which has hitherto been better known for a service that allows consumers to buy goods through third-party retailers in instalments. Moving forward, the Klarna app will not only serve as a payment network, but a “single shopping destination” for finding the cheapest deals and paying. Digging into the specifics, the new price comparison smarts allow customers to filter their searches by criteria such as size, color, ratings, availability, shipping options, and more. On top of that, Klarna shows shoppers historical pricing data, which shows how the cost has fluctuated over time and whether they should buy now, or wait a little longer to see if the price goes down.  A ‘credible alternative’ The company said that the tool is designed to serve as a “credible alternative” to other shopping services from the likes of Google and Amazon. Indeed, PriceRunner is in fact in the process of suing Google for more than $2 billion in Europe, alleging that the internet giant continues to breach a 2017 antitrust enforcement order against Google Shopping. The long and short of that case involves Google allegedly giving prominence to its own comparison shopping service in Google Search results. And this is why Klarna is pushing the message here that its own price comparison product is “unbiased” in the results that it serves up.  “You could spend the whole day comparing offers at conventional search engines or marketplaces, but you’ll always have doubts — have I really found the best product at the best price?,” Klarna cofounder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in a press release. “Klarna’s new search and compare tool does the hard work for consumers and compares thousands of websites in real time to ensure they have all the information they need to make informed and confident purchase decisions.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy faces enormous challenges amid falling profits and negative numbers • ZebethMedia

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is the definition of a company man. In an age when people switch jobs frequently, he has been at Amazon for 25 years, working his way up to president and CEO. But before he reached the corner office, he helped build Amazon Web Services, its cloud arm, into a $60 billion juggernaut. It wasn’t exactly a rise from the mailroom, but Jassy was there as founder Jeff Bezos’ aide-de-camp when they came up with the idea of AWS in the early 2000s at an executive offsite. He helped build it. He nurtured it. He made it into the crown jewel of the company. So when Bezos announced he was stepping down early last year, it didn’t take long for the organization to turn to Jassy, whose hard work at AWS and his deep understanding of company culture seemed to make him the perfect heir apparent. But things haven’t necessarily gone as planned since he took over the leadership role in July 2021. Much of what has happened has been out of his control. Like many chief executives, he inherited the problems left behind by his predecessor. During the pandemic, Amazon became the general store for the world. People stuck in lockdown turned to Amazon for their goods. The company’s revenues mushroomed and its workforce exploded, with the organization adding an astonishing 800,000 workers, mostly in its warehouses (per The Wall Street Journal). The future was bright, but as Jassy took over last year, people were heading out again. Suddenly, everyone wasn’t buying everything online anymore. As we headed into 2022, other macroeconomic factors began to affect commerce — online and brick-and-mortar — as inflation soared and consumers’ buying power began to diminish. Add to that the higher cost of energy and persistent supply chain issues, and Amazon was suddenly facing some challenges that were beginning to have a serious impact on earnings.

Perfekto bags $1.1M to find homes for imperfect produce in Mexico • ZebethMedia

Over a third of food ends up wasted across the globe, with 6% of that occurring in the Latin America and Caribbean regions. Among that waste, the majority of it, around 70%, occurs prior to the consumer stage. This is where Perfekto believes its subscription box of imperfect food can help. Launched in 2021, the Mexico-based company works with over 70 producers to “rescue” food and delivers it to consumers. Subscribers used to get a “surprise box,” but can now personalize their box and choose how much of each type of produce they want. On the backend, the company developed software that automates routing and logistics. In the past year, the company was part of Y Combinator’s summer 2021 batch, grew to over 3,000 active monthly subscribers and reached $1 million in annual run rate, Jan Heinvirta, co-founder and CEO, told ZebethMedia. Subscribers average two boxes per month. “We saw an expensive problem that needed urgent solution,” he added. “We felt like it’s time to do this because no more time should be wasted. We also saw a trend going in the direction of consumers being more responsible.” It’s an expensive problem indeed, with the cost of food waste estimated to be around $940 billion each year. And that’s while 9.7 million people across Latin America have food insecurity. Add to that, grocery delivery businesses in the business-to-consumer space are traditionally a capital-intensive business. Even highly venture-backed companies find it difficult to reach profitability. Heinvirta said it is possible to build a grocery delivery business with positive unit economics. Since December, Perfekto also grew over 10x across all key performance indicators and rescued 1 million pounds of produce. “We have been very capital efficient, reaching $1 million in ARR having spent less than $1 million,” he added. “This is possible thanks to our subscription model, efficient logistics model and strong organic growth.” Heinvirta, who grew up in a Swiss farmer village and has a background in financial services, moved to Mexico and met Anahí Sosa, the daughter of a citrus producer who told ZebethMedia that she saw how imperfections affected her father’s business. She went on to lead Uber’s grocery initiative in Latin America and later helped launch Cornershop in Costa Rica. Together Heinvirta and Sosa, chief operating officer, started Perfekto. They recently brought on Juan Andrade as the third co-founder and chief supply chain officer. Andrade was a logistics advisor to the company since it started and previously led Walmart’s e-commerce logistics operations in Mexico. Perfekto co-founders Jan Heinvirta, Anahí Sosa, and Juan Andrade (Image credit: Perfekto) The company is among a group of startups that want to save produce and other food from ending up in landfills. Today, it announces $1.1 million in pre-seed funding to expand its program across Mexico City. Over the past year we’ve seen a number of them also get venture capital backing for their approaches. For example, Full Harvest raised $23 million in Series B funding at the end of 2021 for its business-to-business marketplace that connects produce buyers and sellers so they can quickly close deals on surplus or imperfect crops. “We have a lot of interest from other cities, and I can certainly plan our international expansion, but we’re focused on Mexico City right now because it is so big,” Heinvirta said. “We plan to reach $2 million in annual run rate within the next six to eight months, and there is an opportunity to grow as much as we can.” Perfekto is also looking at some new opportunities beyond fruits and vegetables and is working with large consumer packaged goods companies that are interested in partnering to reduce food waste for other items that have a short shelf life or damaged packaging. There is also increased interest coming from businesses that are subscribing to a box of fruit each week, he added. The company just launched a crowdfunding campaign, but in the meantime, Heinvirta intends to plug the new capital into three areas: improve operations and technology, expand its catalog of products to offer customers more variety and growth in the B2B space.

Next acquires Made.com’s brand and IP as the online furniture retailer enters administration • ZebethMedia

We knew it was happening, but U.K.-based online furniture and home accessories retailer Made.com has officially entered administration, confirming previous reports with the appointment yesterday of PricewaterhouseCoopers as administrators. While Made.com had revealed that it was in discussions with potential buyers, nothing materialized in time and the company ceased taking new orders in late October, with none of the interested parties able to “meet the necessary timetable” for closing a deal. However, news did emerge today that Made.com’s domain names, intellectual property, and brand have been acquired by Next, a multinational retailer with physical and online stores substantively in the U.K. “Having run an extensive process to secure the future of the business, we are deeply disappointed that we have reached this point and how it will affect all our stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers and shareholders,” Made.com chair Susanne Given said in a statement issued today. “We appreciate and deeply regret the frustration that MDL (Made.com) going into administration will have caused for everyone.” Road to ruin Founded out of London in 2010, Made.com emerged as one of the U.K.’s most promising startups, raising some $137 million in investors’ money for a business that optimized the entire furniture design, manufacturing, and sales processes through forging close partnerships with partner companies. The company went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 at a valuation of around £775 million, though its share price has been in perpetual decline since IPO day last June, and with the company reporting growing losses and job cut plans throughout 2022, the writing has been on the wall. Reports suggest that Next paid just £3.4 million to acquire Made.com’s brand and IP. Cofounder and former CEO Ning Li, who left Made.com in 2017, posted an open letter stating that he had made three bids to buy the company back with his own cash and try to turn things around, but was ultimately rejected. “Unfortunately, my proposal wasn’t accepted,” Li wrote. “Apparently, it would be preferable to break the company up and sell it in pieces to generate a little more cash. It makes no sense to me. But I wanted you to know that I really tried.” It’s worth noting that Made.com recently stated that it wouldn’t be processing any requests for refunds for customers with pending orders, and it’s not clear at this juncture whether this will change in the future — at the moment, the administrators are concerned with selling all of Made.com’s remaining assets and making payments to its creditors. And the board said today that it eventually expects “any residual value” left after the administration process to be distributed to the company’s shareholders. It’s also not clear what Next’s plans are for the Made.com brand, and whether it plans to retain any of the 500 jobs currently on the line with Made.com entering administration.

Amazon quietly opens its logistics network to third-party merchants in India • ZebethMedia

Amazon is quietly beginning to offer its transportation and logistics network as a service to third-party merchants, businesses and direct-to-consumer brands in India, tapping its large delivery chain to drive revenue in the key overseas market as the e-commerce group attempts to replicate a model it has been testing in the U.S. for several months. The service, called Amazon Shipping, offers “extensive reach and the highest reliability – all at the lowest logistics cost,” the company describes on its website. Amazon Shipping “will pick up your parcels 7 days a week, and deliver them to your customers,” the company adds. The retailer, which has poured over $6.5 billion in India over the past seven years, says it’s offerings its shipping at “competitive rates,” and includes a dedicated support channel. There’s no additional fee for deliveries on weekends and customers are not tied to any contract for a consignment, allowing them to cancel the service at any time. It has partnered with local firms Shiprocket, Unicommerce, Easyecom, Clickpost and Vinculum for order and delivery management systems, it says on the site. The company has been testing the service for at least a few months in India, according to an analysis of the archived pages. As Amazon expands the Shipping service, it may become a headache to local firms including Delhivery, Ecom Express, and even legacy logistics giants including Blue Dart and India Post. Flipkart, the Walmart-backed rival of Amazon in India, also began to open its logistics network to third-party firms earlier this year. Indian newspaper Economic Times first reported about Amazon Shipping, and added that Amazon Shipping covers all types of products other than dangerous and hazardous goods. On a policy page, Amazon says Shipping currently offers the ground mode of deliveries and resricts the number of shipments items to 99 per order. Amazon opened its logistics network to third-party merchants in the U.S. earlier this year with a service called Buy with Prime. Analysts say that Amazon can pose a greater challenge to rivals like Shopify with the move because it has built a nearly “impregnable moat in logistics.” “Today Amazon’s logistics is massive and fully integrated from the fulfillment center to the doorstep, even though it only serves Amazon; the obvious next step is opening it up to non-Amazon retailers, and that is exactly what is happening,” Stratechery’s Ben Thompson wrote earlier this year.

Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec step down as Jumia co-CEOs • ZebethMedia

African e-commerce giant Jumia has made a new change in management as co-founders Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec step down effective today as co-CEOs, according to a statement seen by ZebethMedia. The two founders, who share the chief executive role, have been at the helm of Africa’s only publicly traded company for over a decade, overseeing Jumia’s pan-African expansion across 11 countries as well as its product journey that now includes a marketplace, JumiaPay, its payment arm and a logistic platform. Francis Dufay, who previously held the CEO role at one of Jumia’s fledging markets, Ivory Coast, will now replace both co-founders as acting CEO, the company’s Supervisory Board said in the statement. Dufay has been with Jumia since 2014, holding multiple senior leadership roles, more recently Executive, VP, Africa, responsible for the group’s e-commerce business across the continent. According to the Supervisory Board, Dufay and Antoine Maillet-Mezeray — previously Jumia’s Group Chief Financial Officer — have been appointed members of the company’s Management Board. Maillet-Mezeray, having stayed with Jumia for over six years and driving the company’s finance function and “further developing it in a public market context,” has earned a promotion too: Executive Vice President, Finance & Operations. “We thank Jeremy and Sacha for their leadership over the last decade to envision and build a company that became the leading pan-African e-commerce player,” Jonathan Klein, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, said of the announcement. “As we look ahead to the next chapter of Jumia’s journey, we want to bring more focus to the core e-commerce business as part of a more simplified and efficient organization with stronger fundamentals and a clearer path to profitability. We look forward to working closely with Francis, Antoine and the leadership team to execute on these objectives and continue on our mission of offering a compelling e-commerce platform to consumers, sellers and the broader Jumia ecosystem in Africa.” This is a developing story…

How ButcherBox bootstrapped to $600M in revenue • ZebethMedia

Some of the best companies only come about because they found a problem worth solving. For Mike Salguero, CEO and co-founder at ButcherBox, the problem and opportunity in the extraordinarily broken space of meat production and distribution simply could not be ignored. Armed with an idea for how to do things differently, the company ran a Kickstarter campaign back in 2015, which drew the attention of its first thousand customers. From there, the company has continued to grow. At the recent Creative Technologist conference organized by venture capital fund Baukunst, Salguero shared that the company has seen $600 million worth of revenue without taking a penny of external investment and talked about some of the lessons he learned along the way.  A rocky start ButcherBox isn’t Salguero’s first rodeo. His first company was CustomMade.com, which raised $30 million in venture capital from First Round Capital, Google and Atlas Ventures in a series of funding rounds. But in spite of all the money it raised, the company wasn’t successful. “My experience was really bad. We lost everyone’s money, which I felt a lot of shame about,” Salguero recalls. “At the very end, I had diluted myself so much, I owned just 5.5% of the company. The business failed, and we ended up going bankrupt, losing everyone’s money.” After that, Salguero decided to walk a very different path with his next company, which he started after being confronted with a very personal problem. His wife has a thyroid condition, and in the process of doing an elimination diet to figure out what foods she might be intolerant to, they learned about grass-fed beef. However, this kind of meat was hard to find in the supermarkets in Boston. “While CustomMade was falling apart, I started calling farmers and asking them if I could buy a half-share of meat,” Salguero laughs. That’s a lot of meat, and he describes it as “basically two trash bags full of beef.” “I was meeting meat farmers in parking lots, buying a couple of trash bags full of meat — I’m sure that didn’t seem sketchy at all,” he said. “But it was too much meat for my freezer, so I ended up selling the excess meat to friends or people I was working for.” Some of his buyers repeatedly told him that it would be much better if the meat was delivered to their houses, and thus, the basic idea for ButcherBox was born. Meat in the mail “I got obsessed with the idea and started researching how you ship meat in the mail. I had no idea how to do it. But I’m a big believer in finding people who have done something before and then asking them for help. It skips a lot of the hard work,” Salguero explains. “I found the former head of operations of Omaha Steaks, which at the time was the big behemoth of meat in the mail. And he just said ‘Oh, yeah, my non-compete just ended. I’ll be glad to help you.’ He put all the pieces together at the beginning.” Then everything started happening all at once. Salguero was fired from CustomMade and even though he had aspirations of taking a 100 days off, going on a silent meditation retreat and recharging, he threw himself into building ButcherBox less than a week later. He hired an intern and launched a Kickstarter campaign in September of 2015, a decision made out of a desperation to never raise money again. Fundraising wouldn’t be necessary, he thought, as he wanted to do this as a hobby rather than as a big business. “I’m only going to put in $10,000 into this thing,” Salguero recalls deciding, adding that he vowed to keep things light and easy. “I gave equity to the Omaha Steaks guy, and I gave equity to the branding studio, which in retrospect was a mistake, because I had way too low of a valuation.”  Mike Salguero, CEO at ButcherBox speaks at the Baukunst Creative Technologists conference. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia All aboard the rocket ship “We agree with vegetarians.” Mike Salguero, CEO, ButcherBox The company had a goal of $25,000 for the crowdfunding campaign, but it ended up raising eight times that amount in preorders. It soon converted a lot of the preorder customers into subscribers, and the rest is history. The company went from revenue of $275,000 in 2015 to $5 million in 2016, then $31 million in 2017 and kept growing. When COVID-19 hit, the meat-packing industry didn’t fare well, but ButcherBox’s revenue just kept growing as people started subscribing to home delivery services like there was no tomorrow. In 2019, the company had revenues of $225 million, but the pandemic tailwinds nearly doubled its top line to $440 million. In 2021, the company recorded $550 million, and this year, Salguero is optimistic his company will go past the $600 million mark.  “This whole time, I’ve just been on a rocket ship,” Salguero says. Beyond the numbers, the company has continued to stay true to its original mission of trying to make a difference. ButcherBox became a certified B corp in January 2021, joining the ranks of other heart-forward companies such as Allbirds, Ben & Jerry’s, King Arthur Flour and Patagonia, and further fortifying its aspirations as a company that takes a stand. Growing without external investment Figuring out how you build and grow a company without external investment is an exercise in scrappiness, but Salguero’s team had a few tricks up its sleeve, starting with the Kickstarter campaign and a number of communities who cared deeply about how and what they eat. The company figured out how to growth-hack its way to success by tapping bloggers and nutritionists. “You said eat grass-fed beef,” the company would tell them and created an affiliate model to help incentivize them to promote its products. “We don’t have any money, so we can’t pay you up front, but we will pay you for every box that person

Benitago Group exec confirms it didn’t close, but did lay off some employees • ZebethMedia

Benitago Group’s website no longer working this week set off an alarm bell for some folks, those who regularly follow the comings-and-goings of active fulfillment-by-Amazon aggregators. They believed it might spell the end for the e-commerce aggregator, which raised $380 million in equity and debt financing last year. Co-founder Benedict Dohmen confirmed to ZebethMedia via LinkedIn message that “Benitago (or any related entity) is not shutting down its operations. We have not sold or disposed of any assets.” Though the company did make a few acquisitions this year, it shifted gears toward brand incubation and operations, or essentially developing their own brands. And unfortunately, this decision led the company to cut staff. One former colleague, who wished to remain anonymous, told me they were with the company for only about three months before his department was let go. Dohmen confirmed the layoffs. “We unfortunately had to reduce the size of our teams by 14%, primarily in the M&A and talent acquisition departments,” he said. “We underestimated the probability and impact of an e-commerce market downtrend. As the world has changed and market pressure for probability rose, we shifted focus towards incubation and operations.” The company was started by Benedict Dohmen and Santiago Nestares (Benitago, get it?) back when they were at Dartmouth College seven years ago. We profiled the company in March 2021 when it raised $55 million in both equity and debt to go about funding acquisitions of brands built to sell on Amazon’s marketplace. Benitago leaning into brand development was more of a return to its roots than anything, Dohmen said. The company began as an incubator and operator. It wasn’t until later in 2021, around the time the company raised a whopping $325 million in Series A equity and debt, that it developed “an acquisitive M&A arm,” he added. E-commerce aggregators buy up brands from marketplaces, like Amazon and Shopify. As we’ve reported, just this week in fact, these kinds of businesses have seen their sector go from very hot two years ago to cool. Some have continued to do well, even grabbing the now random venture capital deal, while others found the funding firehose dry up. Dohmen, too, noted that the shift in strategy to focus on brand incubation and operations was “due to the increasing cost of debt.” The new focus seems to be paying off for the company now. The incubation effort accounts for 20% of Benitago’s business and is growing 88% quarter over quarter, Dohmen said. Consolidated revenue in the third quarter was up 308% from last year, and this quarter “was Benitago’s most profitable and cash-flowing quarter yet,” he added. The company has since developed five international brands, operates over 10 brands and has over 300 new products in the pipeline. Dohmen doesn’t believe Benitago is done with M&A, but does admit that future acquisitions will be “more targeted,” and instead of casting a wide net on Amazon, it “will only seek brands that fit with our current brands’ strategic direction.” “We regret being overly optimistic and not foreseeing the e-commerce downtrend and the rising cost of capital,” Dohmen said. “We take full responsibility and are sad about the reduction in team. But we’re excited about the brands and products we have in the pipeline, and we’re excited to come out of this recession much stronger.”

Subscribe to Zebeth Media Solutions

You may contact us by filling in this form any time you need professional support or have any questions. You can also fill in the form to leave your comments or feedback.

We respect your privacy.
business and solar energy