Profile: Stephane Setbon, CEO and founder of Spootnik

Stephane Setbon, CEO and founder of Spootnik, the unique high-end fashion start-up that mixes eCommerce with social media, tells us how his niche is growing fast and why buying in bulk wholesale allows customers to get high-quality items without the premium price tag.

Stephane, tell me about Spootnik.

It’s a website that looks for the best products in the world, through a community of like-minded people who love beautiful, quality items.

We have two sides to the business, one is the online community where people in over 50 countries help us to find amazing products.

We rank items into categories such as the best men’s shirts, ladies bags, shoes and even food like the best mineral water. People add the images and other members can like them. It is a way of finding products from all over the world that many people would never know about, products from Tokyo, New York – anywhere.

You have to look really deeply into these places to find the products. We have 50 items coming in from our community per day and we’ve only just started – this helps us to find the best.

The other side is the selling of these products. If you find these products in other countries it is not always easy to buy them. There are barriers such as language and the logistics of getting the products to you – it can be really expensive. This often leaves you with one option, buy the products that are near to where you are. We want to give people access to these products.

So how do you offer the products to your user base?

We identify popular brands and approach them. We say you’ve been spotted on Spootnik, someone on the user base had added one of your products, they have been ranked really highly and people really love your stuff. Often these are brands that are just emerging, so not really popular outside of their own countries – so it is really good news.

Every week we have a sale from a different city, partnering with a brand from there. We give our users a chance to buy the products for that week. At the end, we look at all of the orders, buy the products and send them out to the buyers free of tax, duty and shipping costs. It is as if they travelled to that city and bought the item themselves.

So it is just one brand and one city at a time?

We are all about quality rather than quantity. We find one brand at a time works best because people can really focus on the brand, understand the story behind it – they all have a story to tell. We don’t decrease the attention paid to the products.

Eventually we will accelerate this to one city and one brand per day so it will be like you are travelling around the world very fast!

How do you offer free duty, tax and shipping?

At the end of a sale we have bought in bulk from a brand so we get the products at wholesale price. The shoppers buy at the price they would have bought in that country and we cover the extra costs because shipping becomes a lot cheaper for us too, when it’s done in such high quantity.

We are shipping items from one source to the buyers. This is why we sell from one city at a time because it allows us to get the discounts.

Where did the idea come from?

I founded another company called myfab.com back in 2008. It gave access to furniture factories around the world so people could buy direct and miss out the middle man – making it a lot cheaper.

We found so many amazing products that you couldn’t get in other countries but many of the unknown brands just weren’t popular because they didn’t market outside their countries. For our customers it was about getting a good price for brands you already knew.

I thought wouldn’t it be great if you could go to a site to find products that you didn’t already know about – a website built around quality.

How easy was to set up the business?

We started out just sharing the idea with friends but we knew it wouldn’t be hard to convert people. We knew we could attract people because we are not alone in our love for beautiful, quality items.

We started out with a BETA site for family and friends of Spootnik last summer but grew organically and rapidly and launched our first sale in New York on December 8th. That was the first time we went open to the general public.

We received a funding round of 1.2m Euros back in September.

At the moment we are open to users from all over the world but can only sell to people in the UK and France. Outside of the UK and France our users treat the site like a social network and a discovery tool for beautiful things. Our goal is to spread to other countries very soon because we have had a lot of interest from countries like Brazil, Italy and the States.

It is a completely different approach to eCommerce, combining the strength of our user base to find the very best products and bring them to people.

The website design looks fantastic, very clean with bold imagery – was that important to you?

Yes that was very important, a vital key to us because to website should convey our goal. We produced it internally to get just the right look – one of the founders is a CTO and was able to produce it.

We have had a lot of support in places like France with celebrities such as artist Andre Saraiva, a good friend of Karl Lagerfeld giving his endorsement.

So what is the plan for growth?

We intend to keep growing the database, in a selective way – to ensure the quality of our products. People must request an invite before they become part of the community. We don’t advertise so we grow through word of mouth but it is working we have many people waiting to gain access.

Than of course we want to open sites in other countries and allow more people to access the sales. Our latest sale is happening in London, the last one was Chicago. We have a huge amount of interest from around the world so we are working on spreading to countries like Brazil, America, Italy etc.

For more check out Spootnik.com