Growing your eCommerce ft. Emna Everard, co-founder of Kazidomi

Kazidomi is an e-commerce that sells healthy products and sustainable products. We are one of the player who managed to not just have customers but have a community of customers. On one side, we have customers who are very important and we have a team that is dedicated to it. But on the other side we have a team that is dedicated to managing great relationships with suppliers because at the end of the day, without the products from the suppliers, we don't have any customers. We ship between 5 and 10 thousands orders per month. The bigger you get, the harder it is to manage the inventory because you have to order a higher quantities, etc. So everything goes through Odoo. It's good to have something that is automated because if you have to take care of that manually first, you'll have mistakes. While if it's an automated system, the risk is very, very low. You don't have to be a developer to launch an e-commerce. Everyone can do it. They're always way, I think, to test the concept, to grow step by step. And I think if you don't give it a shot, you you'll never know. So yeah, my advice is just there and give it a big shot. Hi and welcome to Planet Odoo. If you don't know us already, the show is all about decoding and sharing with you all the innovations, strategies, internal quirks and success stories from the Odoo world, from exclusive Odoo insights industry, behind the scenes or dev debates. We are passionate about helping companies unleash their growth potential. For today's episode, we're thrilled to have Emna Everard, co-founder of Kazidomi, a leading e-commerce platform for organic and healthy products. Emna's journey is nothing short of inspiring going from a student to a trailblazing entrepreneur. She started her e-commerce empire from scratch and knows what it takes to succeed in this highly competitive industry. Today she's with us to talk about the ins and outs of how Kazidomi continues to grow and scale their business from sourcing a product to the point where it's in the hands of the customer and everything that happens in between. So if you're ready, let's dive in. All right, great. Well, thank you very much for joining me today. I'm really excited to talk about Kazidomi and and everything that you guys have going on. Thanks a lot. It's a pleasure to be here with you today as well. So let's get started. What is Kazidomi? Kazidomi is an e-commerce that sells healthy products and sustainable products. So we have a few thousand different products ranging from food to cosmetics supplements. Basically everything you can find in a supermarket. And the big advantage, of course, is that we try to make healthy products more affordable with a membership system. So our customers, our members, that means that they buy a loyalty card that costs €80 a year and that gives them access to discounted price on all the products. On average, a member will save up to €600 at Kazidomi. Very nice. And what markets are you focusing on right now? Mainly it's Belgium and France because the communication is in French, but we ship everywhere across Europe. So you can be in Spain, you can be in Denmark. We ship also there, but you will probably discuss about that later on. Yeah, it's not just about delivering in those countries. You also have to adapt with a specific product offering, but also communicate in the right language, etc. That's a little bit the complication we have here in Europe if we compare it to the US where you can speak English everywhere. Yeah, that's so true that you really have to be adaptable to that, which is also part of the beauty of choosing to be an online retailer because you have so many tools available to you to kind of make that happen, of course, it takes some effort as well. But why did you decide to be an online retailer versus having a traditional brick and mortar shop? That's a good question. At first I wanted to open a supermarket, but Kazidomi you have to know that it's a kind of a child dream. I was really dreaming about making healthy products more accessible to to everyone since many years. And when I thought about it at first, it was more of a supermarket. Why? Because we weren't speaking about the online, the digital platforms, etc. There weren't a lot of platforms or tools, etc. For e-commerce. It was really the beginning of e-commerce. But when I started my study, I realized that actually having a digital business was much more easy to implement than a physical shop, especially because I was still a student when I launched Kazidomi, I didn't have a lot of financial means, and nowadays you can really launch an e-commerce without a lot of money, a lot of experience. There are a lot of information you can find online. There are so many tools and platforms that are available to build your e-commerce. So yeah, the main reason was just because it was easier. And then of course, I realized that having an e-commerce is not just easier than a supermarket. I think it's just different. It's a different kind of business and, and I think, yeah, you can be great at doing e-commerce. And really bad at doing physical commerce. And the opposite is also true. And so let's talk quickly about numbers from where you started. You were a student. You had this amazing idea to where you are now. What was your growth like? How many customers do you have? How many countries are you working with? You mentioned it briefly, but just a brief summary in numbers. Yeah, we have today 4000 different products, which isn't a lot. It can it can look to be a lot, but it isn't, because if you compare it to a normal supermarket, it's yeah, more around 10 to 20 thousands different products. But what we've decided is really to focus on the best products. Like for example, we sell tomato sauce, which you have in every supermarket, but in every supermarket you can find five to sometimes 20 different tomato sauces. You will only find 1 or 2 at Kazidomi because we really curate the product because we think it's the best quality price ratio, but it's also the best products for for the planet and for the health. So for chosen different products, amount of customers, we have tens of thousands of members, but we also sell to non members. So we have also around I think it's around 100,000 customers, normal customers and orders. Yeah, we ship between 5 and 10 thousands orders per month. That's amazing. That's huge. So what are the main stages in building your e-commerce? How do you get started doing this? The first thing is, and it's not specifically related to e-commerce, it's just related to business, You need to find a great market fit. So you need to make sure that your ID will find a market, will find customers. So you have to test it first. And once you've validated that, yeah, you need to find what is the best technology for it. If you want to build an e-commerce, there are different platforms. You can choose to build it from scratch, which I don't recommend because it's definitely a lot of work and you can definitely find a lot of great solutions on the market. You need to find the way you're going to attract customers and that's a big deal and that's something entrepreneurs, they sometimes forget at the beginning. They have the idea, they implement it, they source the products because you also need to find, of course, what you want to sell on the e-commerce. And then they're just waiting and they don't see any orders. Yeah, just because they didn't think enough probably about the way they want to attract their customers. So you need to build a strong digital marketing strategy, right? So based on your opinion and based on what Kazidomi is actually doing or what Kazidomi has done in the past, what are some of the basic principles to grow your e-commerce? That's a good question. I'd say there are two parts in the marketing that are very important. The first one is acquisition because of course the more customers you have, the bigger your website can get. But the other very important aspect is the retention, because you can actually get a lot with your current customers. And if you take if you pay attention to them and you provide them with the right products, the right content, etc, they will come back and you won't have to spend money again and again because if they're convinced about a service that you provide, yeah, you won't have to spend on ads and stuff like that, which is very often quite expensive. At Kazidomi the different sources, marketing sources or channels that we're using are first influencers. So we work with people because we think that there is nothing that is more convincing than real people who are explaining you the concept or explaining you how we select the products and stuff like that. So we work with influencers on social networks, but also influencers like ambassadors such as naturopaths, doctors, etc, who are very powerful and inspirational, inspiring people. We also do a lot of content and that's very cheap, except of course, the cost of building the content. But we write a lot of content on the social media. We have a blog, we provide customers with recipes about how to use the products. We do a lot on site because very often we think about the external channels, but there is a lot that you can do on the website when you see the conversion rate for e-commerce is it's very often between 2 or 3% and that is already already quite high. And in many cases, just because they don't have a website that is well conceived, the the value proposition is not clear. They don't find the product well. The, the the I don't know, the advert is buggy etc. So making sure the customer experience on the website is very key and making sure you also provide a personal experience is important and that's something it's hard to do it at the very beginning, but once you have a big a size that is big enough. You can have like a specific home page for this type of customer, another one for this type. You can show products that the customer has already bought before and stuff like that. So very important to as soon as you can provide with a personal experience that is very well appreciated by customers. And then the last one, which is in the least important one is the digital eyes. So today you have to be present on Google and on Facebook. It's a very great way to attract new customers or also to reconvince old customers to come back on your website. So out of all of these strategies, which one would you count on the most or maybe not just one to actually convert those one time customers to returning long term customers. Anything? I didn't mention it, but it's very a very powerful part of the marketing. Once you have the customer's email, you can do really a lot with it. You can personalize the emails depending on which type of customers it is. It can be like a customer who hasn't placed an order since two weeks. It can be a customer who hasn't placed any orders since two months. The message doesn't have to be the same. The promo codes that you will give to the first type or the second time won't be the same, etc. So a great marketing automation strategy is also a very great tool and you can implement it from the very, very beginning. Again, they are very famous tool for for that everything can be automated very easily. So I'd say the most important marketing automation flows are the welcome flow. When customers arrive on the website and they register on your website and they didn't place any order because the one who placed an order, you don't really have to like push them with promotions and emails etc. Most of the time they don't want to receive it, but the ones you want to push are the ones who haven't placed any order. Then there is the the churn or sleepy flows for customers who haven't placed an order since some time. And the one that I recommend the most, most, most important is the abandoned cart flow, where once customers have placed some products in their baskets, you just send them an email with the products that they put in the basket telling them, okay, just don't forget about your basket. If you see that they don't finalize the order, you can always decide to push them with a little promo code or a small gift in order to convert them. And that's the one that is working the best in in most of the cases. That's the one that works the best on me, I think. And what kind of tools did you do for this growth and to attract customers. With it many things. There are many different channels, but at first what we did, because we didn't have a lot of budget, we decided to work with people. So we worked with influencers who were recommending the platform to their followers and that worked quite well and it's still working today. But then very quickly, if you want to scale, you need of course, to spend a budget on SEO, on SEA, you need to decide about what is going to be your strategy, your spending strategy on Google, on Facebook, because that's the only way today to really grow a business online. And of course, once you actually get these customers and once they're hooked on your product and subscribing to your website, you have to develop this relationship with them. So how do you focus on customer support or other things that help you grow your community? But for me, that's something you need to to do also at the very beginning, because the first customers you will attract are going to be the ones who are going to speak about your business. And if they speak about it badly, you're never going to grow. And they're always there and there is nothing that is less convincing than

"yeah, buy on Kazidomi, the experience is amazing, the products look good, etc." So I think you really need to take care of your customers from the very, very beginning. And yeah, if you want to take care about them, you have to work on the customer experience. So the products you need to be good. The delivery promise has to be filled in because if you tell customers you you'll be delivered in 48 hours and they get their parcel two weeks later, that's, yeah, you didn't respect your promise. So that's very important. You have to work on the operations and then you have to work on the contact you have with the customer. So you need to find the right profiles, who can speak with them, who can to send them emails, etc. And then of course, you need to find the right tools. And today there are great tools to communicate with customers to manage the tickets you you get from the customers, etc. It's very important, I think, for a company to be very accessible. If you want to file a claim because you had a problem, it has to be very easy to fill. You have to find the phone number of the company very easily, etc. So it really looks like you really, well, of course, care about your customers a lot and you focus on them and I love that you mentioned that word of mouth is one of the best ways you can market yourselves. And this is actually something that has come up in past episodes that we've done as well with other people. So it's just funny that you also put a lot of importance on that. So all right, let's picture a scene here. A customer goes to your website, they purchase a product. What is the cycle of this entire order from actually picking out the product to the customer, arriving to the website, to them, ordering to them, receiving those items? So we have all the products in a warehouse. So if a customer places an order on the website, it means that he actually ordered products that we have somewhere. So when you place an order on Kazidomi, our logistics team, they will have an alert with the list of products they need to pick. They will go in the warehouse, prepare all the products, put them all in a box, and then other people, the Packers, we call them the Packers because they have to pack the orders. The Packers will take care of preparing the parcel, etc, and then depending on the delivery method that they choose or depending on the country, the country where the customer is living or wants to get the parcel delivered, there is a different process and we have shipping companies that will come to the warehouse and take the different parcels. We don't handle the shipping because there are companies that do it much better than us and it's also for us more sustainable to give the parcels to a company to be post, for example, in Belgium, because they will anyway go in every street almost every day. So that's the best option. Okay, great. And you mentioned that you really carefully pick the products that you put on your website that you put up for sale. So actually, how do you figure out who you want to work with? How do you find these products? How do you find your suppliers? Do you contact these companies? Do they find you and say, we're interested in what you're doing? I have this great product. How does that happen? Yeah, it's a mix of different things. First, we have many customers who are just like used to buy a specific brand and they will just send us an email saying, okay, that would be so great if you add this brand I'm used to buy, it's very nice, etc. So we pay a lot of attention to what customers are asking because we of course want to make sure Kazidomi is a one stop shop for them and we really want to avoid that they have to go somewhere else to do the groceries because once they are somewhere else, there is a risk that they don't come back. And yeah, so customer satisfaction is again very important. We also contact many suppliers by ourselves because we identify some gaps in the catalog. Like for example, we didn't have, I don't know, just to give an example, almond milk in the catalog and we can see in the search because we have access to the search results from customers who are trying to search specific products on the websites. We know we don't have it. There is a gap. So just contact suppliers and we'll yeah, we'll reach out and we see if they can provide us with the products we are looking for. And then the last option is just suppliers that contact us, they hear about us and they just fill a form on the website and they ask us if we would be interested or not. And sometimes it's the case, sometimes not. Oh, wow. Okay. And what's your criteria for actually going forward with a specific product so you know that there's a need for almond milk or whatever the product is. What is your criteria to choose the best? First, we work with experts and we have someone inside the company that is going to look through every product sticker. So we don't accept products that have like bad additives, too much sugar, too much sugar or too much bad ingredients. For example, if it's the case and if a product contains an ingredient that is forbidden in our criteria list, there is no case to introduce the product. And it's really the promise that we want to deliver to customers. It's you can close your eyes and what you you you buy because we do the check before. Secondly, we check all the things related to the sustainability and also to the values of the suppliers, which are very important. So we're going to ask a lot of questions to understand how the products are produced, with whom they are working, what are the standards of the company. And then we see if there is a match or not, if there is a feeling or not with the suppliers. And then of course, we have we have to check the price and decide about the proper negotiations, KPIs and numbers, etc, which every company also has to to go through. Right. Of course. It's really nice in this process that you really try to collaborate only with people who share the same values as Kazidomi, and that's something that's really special as well. It's not that you just hold that for yourself, but you make sure that everyone else is accountable to that as well. So that's really great for the customer as well, who of course believes in in the mission. So let's talk a little bit more about inventory. So you offer a wide range of products, I suppose, as perishable as well as non perishable. What is it like keeping track of all of these as well as for storage? What does that look like for Kazidomi? So we have two different types of products. We have dry products, let's say, which have at least three months of expiration day. So there is at least three months before the product gets perished. For those products, once they enter in the warehouse, we kind of give them effective expiration dates because we know it's at least three months and those products, they will be kind of tagged and if with this expiration date and after three months, if those products were not sold, then there is a manual check from our logistics people that will check if the expiration date is okay or not. If it's not okay, they will just remove them from the inventory. If it's still okay, they will then put in the system the real expiration date. So that's for for the dry products. But the system works well because most of the time the expiration dates are longer and the rotation of the products is good enough. So that's why we are not like putting all the expiration date from from all the products the the... Doing it doesn't make sense because it has a cost and that's why we found the system. And then we have the fresh products. And for fresh products it's a bit different. And yeah, handling fresh products is, is much more complicated at first. And I'm explaining this because I think it's important and interesting as well. At first we were ordering fresh products every 2 or 3 days, but even by doing it that you have problems because yeah, the products are like you can for example, if you sell chicken, you have to sell it in the two next days, otherwise you have to get rid of it. So it's very, very hard. And the bigger you get, the harder it is to manage the inventory because you have to order a higher quantities, etc. So what we do know is that we work just in time with the just in time principle. So when the customer is ordering something on a website before a

00 pm, all the products will be sent to the suppliers. So all the products from all the customers who have ordered before

00 pm will be sent to the suppliers. So I'm just going to repeat it just to make it more clear. So basically how it is working is that we have a cut off and all the orders that were placed before this cut off, we're going to count all the products that are in those orders and we will send them all to the suppliers. And then we have to get the products from the suppliers before 6 a.m. in the morning. So the products are going to be ordered towards the suppliers only after the customers have placed their order. Before, what we were doing was the opposite. We were ordering the products, putting them in the inventory, and then the customers had access only to the products that we had in the inventory. Now the system is much more flexible because first customers, they can order much more we don't have out of stocks because the stock is kind of the inventory is kind of infinite for for every product because we are only ordering later. And the other thing is that we have much less waste because we don't have this problem of having to throw away products that gets perished. And so that must mean that you have a really close relationship with your suppliers as well. You must have a lot of faith in them and work with people. Of course it's very important and it's yeah, it's part of the business. On one side we have customers who are very important and we have a team that is dedicated to it. But on the other side, we have a team that is dedicated to managing great relationships with suppliers because at the end of the day, without the products from the suppliers, we don't have any customers, right? Everyone needs to work together seamlessly to give the best results. And so the just in time method, you apply this to all of your products and this is how you're able to manage your stock levels as demand grows or decreases for some products, or do you have some just in case inventory as well for certain products? Yeah, the system for the just in time, the products, the fresh products actually that we ordered just in time with just in time principle is different because then we just check what is the quantity, what quantities do we need. While for the dry products, it's different. We have to estimate the volumes that we're going to sell, and that depends on many different factors. One is the seasonality. Some products like soups, for example, or teas itself super well during winter while in the summer the sales there definitely decreasing. So you have to take that into account. You have to check what were the previous cells in order to estimate what are going to be the volumes for the next weeks. You have to take into account many criteria related to the suppliers. Some suppliers, they take two days to deliver you the products. Some other suppliers, they take two weeks, some others a month. If it's the own brand and the volumes are bigger, they also have very often what we call a Franco. A Franco is a minimum order quantity that you have to order. So there are, I don't know, between 10 and 20 different things we need to take into account. And we have an algorithm that takes all those criteria into account and that will compute after that the exact amount of products we need to order to every suppliers. And I guess this algorithm also helps you scale up as you grow. It can adapt to that as well. Yeah, exactly. We put a growth rate that we can adjust, of course. And based on that, yeah, we predict the amount of products we we have to order. So you mentioned that the supplier they need to get the product for you in the case of fresh products. Let's go back to that quickly. They need to get the products to you by 6 a.m. so that you can send them out to the customers. What are the quality checks you actually make after receiving the products from your supplier? We check first the quality. Of course, it can happen that we order tomatoes and actually you can just not sell the tomatoes because they're almost past. So that's one thing. Then we need to check the quantities because sometimes we order ten and you get five and you your invoice is three. So sometimes it's really a pain to to check everything. But in most of the case, there are no mistakes. But it can happen. Sometimes you also get a product that we haven't order. So we need to make sure that the suppliers doesn't invoice, that the supplier don't invoice that and also comes later to take the product because we don't want to keep like, for example, bananas, that we have an order in the warehouse, it's going to perish. And yeah, it's just like bad. What else do we check? We check the price, of course, because we negotiate a price. So if the price that we've negotiated is not the one that is invoiced, it can also poses some problem. So yeah, I think that's about it. And all of these invoices that you're managing for the suppliers as well as the customers right now, you're using Odoo to manage that flow. Indeed, everything goes through Odoo. So all the invoices from customers, they're going through Odoo. All the invoices that are suppliers give us, they're also going through Odoo. We have hundreds of different suppliers and thousands and thousands of different orders every month. So it's good to have something that is automated because if you have to take care of that manually first, you'll have mistakes. While if it's an automated system, it can happen that there are some mistakes that occur. But yeah, in most cases the risk is very, very low and we also use it for the accounting, which is good because we only have to put the invoice once and then the whole accounting things can happen there as well. Right. And you can manage your other reports and get ready for the end of the fiscal year. So you don't just work with suppliers, but you also have your own brand, you have your own products. When did you decide to develop the Kazidomi brand? Quite early. I think after a year or a year and a half. So Kazidomi has seven years now. So it was at the beginning and we decided to do it because we realized that there are many players in the retail chain. You have a producer, then very often you have a brand, so a supplier, and then you have wholesaler or distributors, we can call them. They resell many different brands from different suppliers. And then there is the e-commerce or the supermarket. And of course every actor in the chain wants to take his part of the pie. So at the end of the day, the price is going to be more expensive for customers if there are many different players in the in the chain. So that was incompatible with our mission. That was to make healthy products more accessible to everyone. So we were checking how we could improve that and make the products healthy products or organic products a bit less, less expensive because they are no most of the time to be more expensive than normal products. And then we we discussed actually directly with producers to see if we had a sufficient volume to work directly with with them. And it wasn't a yes for all suppliers or all producers, but it was a yes for some of them. And so we started with, for example, a coconut range of products with coconut milk, coconut sugar, coconut flour. That was the first range that we developed. And then a few months later, we had enough volumes for cans. So we decided to produce chickpeas, beans, etc. And then another range, etc. And today there's still some range we know we want to develop them. The volume are not yet big enough, like, for example, vegetable drinks or vegetable milks. We know one day will produce them. But today we are we don't have the the the the sufficient sufficient volume yet. But so basically we decided to do this own brand first to be able to propose a better price for the customers, also improve a little bit our margin. And then the second reason was because when you work directly with producers, you can actually ask them exactly what you want, remove the salt, remove the the sugar, please. I don't want any additives in this. So because of that, we were able to develop, for example, cans without any salts. While if you go to a supermarket and you check the ingredients for chickpeas, most of the time they add salt because it's an additives that will make sure that the products last longer. And how do you decide exactly what kind of recipe you want to use or what should go out of the product? What should stay in? Where do you make these sort of decisions? We only produce or it's not us who produce the product, but we only want to develop with our own label products that are commodities. So products that everyone can can buy, like chickpeas, everyone can buy it. You're not going to see those chickpeas are better than those ones. Actually, yeah, they're very similar in most cases. So it's not like we have an R&D team inside the company who's going to spend a lot of time trying to make sure that the product is going to to smell very good. What we do as most, we try to check what the product's composition look like at the moment and see if we can improve it or not. I mentioned the cans. We did the same with tomato sauce, so we decided to get rid of additives and sugar in the tomato sauces. But it's not like we decided to add 10, 10 different sorts of spices in the tomato. So in order to make it a bit more tasty, but the products are great, the taste is quality, taste is good. So it's amazing that you offer such a range and you do give this possibility to your customers. Now, what would you say is the average order size or even more specifically, what is even the average weight of a package that you might have to ship out? That's a good question because we have for Kazidomi, the order size is quite big because people really do their groceries. We have some people who are just coming on a website buying one product, but let's say that those are the the most interesting customer for us because they will never come back because, yeah, we have a fixed price or a fixed cost to prepare the order, etc. And if the amount inside the order is not big enough, it's just not sustainable for us. So what we target more as people who are going to buy the groceries and going to then place frequently an order on the website. So the average amount of product in an order is around 20 and 20 products ranging from very small ones like, like, I don't know, a supplement to big ones like the biggest products I think we have is a nappies for a baby. So yeah, the size of the package are very also different from from one customer to to another. So how do you keep this sustainable? What are the kind of materials that you're using in order to actually pack these items? That's something that is tricky because you have to find actually the right balance between having a package that is, let's say, sustainable and not having a cost that explodes. Right? Because very often the more sustainable the options, the higher the cost. So today we really try to find the best solutions for the environment. But sometimes it's a bit complicated because, for example, a tape, if you want to have a sustainable one, which is the case for Kazidomi, it's basically with the potato starch that it's built, the cost is three times more expensive than the plastic ones. So it just it's a choice that we have to to make and we talk about it to our customers so that they kind of understand why pricing of the delivery can be a bit higher, etc. But it's a choice that we are making that customers have to understand. And yeah, we want to do it because I think we, we think that it's better for, for the planet. So we use better, better tape for the environment. The all the boxes that we use, they're recyclable and we use recyclable paper as well. We reuse all the cardboard boxes from suppliers and we kind of shred them and we reuse them to protect the products. So we do quite a lot. I think definitely we can do better because there is always room for improvements. But we have one thing that we really try to communicate and do in the warehouse is just not having a thing of plastic. That's very important. We don't want the customer to have plastic in his order. There is already plastic as a as a packaging for for the products that we cannot avoid yet. But for the protection, definitely no plastic. If it's in your control. No plastic. Exactly. That's an amazing challenge to give yourself a really, really nice. So of course part of these materials are in the calculation of the shipping costs. What other things are considered from the clients perspective? What is included in the shipping costs and what shipping options do you use? Actually, not much because the shipping cost, if you see what we invoice from the delivering the delivery companies and the total cost of handling or preparing an order plus the cost of the packaging, we are much above what we charge to our customers and that's the case for most e-commerce. And I think except if you sell very expensive products and then people are not very sensitive to the delivery cost. Otherwise, yeah, if, if we price like 15 or 20 euros for the shipping fees to a customer, he will never validate his order. So that's something that is tricky for e-commerce, is to find the right balance between having a delivery that is not too expensive but still covering part of the cost you will occur. And now going back to Kazidomi as a larger project, so you're primarily online, but you have opened a few offline stands and shops, if I'm not mistaken. Could you tell us more about those? We don't have offline shops yet. Okay. It's just it's just a in the plan in the works. It's it's not really in the plan. But what we think is that it's important to also be present in physical shops because they're just people, some people don't want to go online either because, yeah, they like to communicate with the seller or they like to actually just go out of their house. Some others, they're just too old and they don't know how any e-commerce is working. So we think it's still important to be to have a presence, a physical presence. So that's why we've decided to sell our products also in other supermarkets. So the own brand, so the Kazidomi products, you can now find them in some supermarkets. First at the moment in Belgium, but we're definitely open to do it in other countries as well. And it's first a way to increase the volumes that we are making and then maybe someday be able to develop vegetable drink for customers, which we cannot do today. And it's also a good way to do marketing because yeah, some customers, they will see like 2 or 3 products in the supermarket and then they'll be, Oh, I really like those products. I'm going to check online. Maybe there are more. And then, yeah, you can convince actually some customers who were only shoppers in physical stores to also come on your platform. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's also great for brand awareness as well. So your website is very responsive. It adapts to desktop as well as tablets or smartphones. And you're also launching an app as well. Yeah, we have it. It's live. Yeah, it's live. And how is that doing? Were people able to quickly switch? Do you find that people prefer shopping using the app than. I was very surprised. Yeah. The conversion rate was just way above our expectations, so that really proved that. Yeah, Most of the people actually today, many people, they spend a lot of time on their phones and it's very easy. You are in the metro, you're queuing for, I don't know, for your sandwich during lunch and stuff like that. So you actually always on your phone at the moment, which is sometimes kind of also sad a bit. But yeah, so I think we have no many customers who are using the app because it's just easier. They can place an order wherever they are if they think about a product, but they don't want to directly place an order, they just add it in the basket. You have push notification, which is an amazing tool, so you can send notification on the phone of your customers, which is amazing because it's not like if you do emailing, you have to first get the right you to send it a notification. Yeah, we have just conversion rates and push notifications that are much above what we have for emailing. So that's also a great way. So an app is first a good way to convert customers. Because it's very convenient, but it's also kind of a marketing channel as well. Right, Absolutely. And it's now a must when it comes to e-commerce. Yeah, definitely. It's definitely what everyone is getting into. And I know personally, I also prefer to shop when there's an app, especially if it's a company that I'm very loyal to. It makes everything smoother. You have to check the one of Kazidomi, then. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So of course, you have grown incredibly since the beginning of Kazidomi, which also means that you have faced many challenges, I'm sure. So I'm going to ask you about a few of those now. One, which is an obvious challenge based on what has happened in the past few years, is COVID-19. How did you manage that with the crisis that was happening in the supply chain? Yeah. Um, we were super, super lucky because the organic sector was less touched by our heads, by all of that. So we managed to get sufficient levels of inventory during the full Covid period. Of course, it wasn't on 100% of the products, but we handled it quite well. And we also, before the real crisis started in Europe, when we heard about it in China, we decided we had a sufficient amount of cash to boost the size of the inventory. So we decided a month before Covid to increase by 50% the size of our inventory, just to make sure in case of a problem we would have sufficient stock. So when Covid hit, of course the volumes, they boomed and it was really a huge difference between before and after. But it's not like all the other supermarkets that were running out of stocks of many products. We had the products like the cans, for example, We decided to launch the cans range around a month before Covid, so cans was crazy. It was the best sellers during the whole Covid period because it's kind of, you know, the kind of products you're buying in a war crisis because you know that it's going to last. So we handle the inventory quite well. But what we really learned during Covid was the the importance of having processes, because when you're small, you can do everything manually. You can handle the customer support with a Gmail account, and that's okay. You can handle the picking of your order with a sheet of paper and that's okay. But once yeah, your, your volumes are rising and rising every day. You have to, to make sure you have great processes that that are in place for the logistics, for the customer support, for the accounting. Yeah. Actually for, for everything. So we had to be very agile and flexible in order to implement all those solutions. And I'm I won't say that I was happy that Covid happened because it was terrible for for many people. But we learned a lot. And today I think we are a more solid company because of all the things we have implemented due to Covid. It's amazing that you guys really thought ahead and were able to adapt quickly considering the situation, which of course contributes to your success. So more and more businesses are going online now as well. Also partly because of the Covid crisis and also just how consumerism is evolving. So how do you distinguish yourself from the competition? That's always a good question. I think first, it's the the product assortment. I mentioned it several times, but for us it's so important to only provide products that are good for the customers and for for the planet. And in Belgium, for example, we are the only shop that is paying more attention to the health and the the, the the planet than any other player. You can go in every supermarket in Belgium. You will find cigarettes, you will find products that are much more too salty or with additives that are sometimes even considered as cancer origin. And yeah, that you will never find on Kazidomi. That's really the promise that we are making. So I'd say that first. The second one is the price. So we are definitely cheaper if you compare the same products that you can find in organic stores etc, We are cheaper thanks to the membership system. And then the last one is the user experience that is different. Again, we put a lot of time energy in order to make sure the the customer experience is is great. On the website, on the app, we make the life of customers much more easy. And I'd say that the last thing is the customer support. We are one of the player who managed to not just have customers but have a community of customers, which I think is very important. So this is why today the main source of inspiration for products additions to the catalog is the customer. So we work a lot with them. When we want to develop a new product, we ask them what colors do they want on the packaging, what type of products they want and stuff like that. So we really managed to build a community because we listen to the customers not only for their ideas but also to the problems and we make sure we fix them quite fast. So yeah, there are many differentiators, but yeah, I think those four ones are definitely the strongest. Very nice. And another challenge you might face as well, especially being an e-commerce simply is data security as well for your customers. So how do you prevent security breaches in regards to that? To be very honest, I know that we pay a lot of attention to to that and we have a technical team that is responsible of it, but I don't know the details about how it's handled, etc. I just know that, yeah, we stick to different boxes and everything is handled like I know that every team has to actually, uh, tackle, uh, yeah, things with data. It can be uh, customer support or always in touch with like customers. They have their address, their emails, etc. The logistics sometimes they also need some, some data from the customers. Yeah. And it's the same for actually every team. So there are rules for every team. And yeah, we, we also have regular checks because things can change. The developers, they can develop a new features and then boom, uh, there is something that has to be checked again. So every month there is a kind of, we call it data check in the company where there are a few things that we have to make sure that are, um, that are okay. And then we also work with the company that is doing a kind of an audit once a year. And we also make sure that at the end of the audit everything is in order. That everything is secure. Your customers don't need to worry. So according to you, what do you think that the future of e-commerce holds, especially with all of these new technologies such as voice search or live selling things that are happening on social media as well? Yeah. Um, it's, um, I think it's just the beginning. I'm really looking forward to see a bit how it's going to evolve because like you mentioned, there is this voice thing that is happening. There is a lot of things that are happening with the AI, uh, rise and yeah, I'm sure in a few years or maybe even earlier, we'll use AI artificial intelligence to do our groceries. That's definitely something that could that could help. And I was mentioning the convenience, the convenience aspect, which is more and more important for customers that don't want to spend time with things that are not a hobby or that's something they like, etc. So everything has to be more convenient and people want to spend more and more time on great stuff, let's say. So I think, yeah, regarding technology, everything is new, adapting much faster than in the past and there are a few not discovery because we we know we know them since since a long time. But there are a few things that are new accelerating like AI or voice search or live shopping and stuff like that. And they're not yet fully there. But but the the the day they're there, I think it's going to have a massive impact on all the e-commerce that for sure. Yeah but I'm looking forward because as an e-commerce player we want to make the life of our customers the easiest possible. So if we can use technology in order to do that, yeah, that is perfect. So this could be in the future of Kazidomi. And what else can we expect from Kazidomi in the near future? If you have something you can share, I know you might not want to spoil everything yet. But we have, we have like so many different projects ongoing. We want to expand internationally. I was mentioning we mainly present in France and Belgium, but the goal is to reach other countries with a tailored offering and a tailored communication. So that's one thing we want to develop more the brick and mortar thing, like with selling our products in more supermarket chains and stuff like that, we only do it in one snow, but the potential is there. We have many players that are reaching to us, so that would be great. And then the last thing and it's for every growing company, we need to adapt and make sure that the quality of the service stays stays where it is today or even better. But yeah, we have to pay attention because when you growing, things can also be a bit more complicated and you have less time to take care of every customers. The logistics quality can also decrease a bit. So that is really for me, a priority in the coming months. Just continue to make sure that, yeah, everything runs smoothly for for customers. Amazing. Thank you. And one last question and then we will end our episode there. If you could give just one piece of advice to any new entrepreneur who is starting their e-business, what would you say to them? It's tricky. Just one is tricky. But I think the answer is very simple. It's just there. Um, there is no big risk. I mentioned it, but you can now launch an e-commerce at a very low cost. Like you have platforms that, yeah, everyone you don't have to be a developer to launch an e-commerce everyone can do it. You are not obliged directly to have your own inventory. You can work with the suppliers who directly ship to the customers. That's what the guy who launched Zappos, which was one of the inspiration of Zalando in the US, he at first when he he wanted to sell shoes, but he didn't have the money to buy the shoes. So he went to different, uh, shops, brick and mortar shops and he told them, yeah, I'm going to put the a picture of your shoes online and if they're sold I'll come and buy the, the shoes and yeah, I'll pay the normal price etc. So he didn't take any risk but he managed to see that there was a demand. So they're always way I think to test the concept to, to grow step by step. And I think if you don't give it a shot you you'll never know. So yeah, my advice is just there and give it a big shot. Well, thank you so much and thank you again for joining me. It has been a wonderful conversation. Thanks to you. Bye. See you soon. Well, that was inspiring. I hope you all enjoyed the insight on Kazidomi's journey and the behind the scenes of a successful e-commerce business. We'll soon be back in your ears. But until then, if you want to discover another inspiring entrepreneurship journey, I highly recommend you listen to our episode with Clio Goldbrenner. Until then, ciao. Ciao.