Olivier Grinda is a serial entrepreneur, ecommerce trailblazer, and Clearco’s Chief Operating Officer (COO). His career has spanned multiple countries and industries, including BrandsClub, Clickon, and direct-to-consumer (DTC) footwear business Shoes4you. Following this, Olivier led Miami real estate company Home61, where he worked to reinvent real estate customer service using technology. We sat down with Olivier for a conversation on all things ecommerce.

Olivier, tell us about BrandsClub - why’d you start it?

I started my career in 2009 when I co-founded and was the Chief Marketing Officer for BrandsClub, a private sales club offering exclusive, heavily discounted brands for 24 hours – similar to sites like Gilt in the US. We operated out of Brazil, and within our first 2 years Brandsclub became one of the top 10 most visited websites in Brazil. 

We grew to $60 million in revenue really quickly, and became one of the first companies in Brazil to raise outside capital for tech following the global financial crisis and economic slowdown - we heralded the new enthusiasm for Latin America. The years leading up to 2015 were a very big moment for technology companies in Brazil.

Talk about the challenges and learnings running a retail and wholesale business:

Running BrandsClub made me see the complexities of blending retail and wholesale. Managing inventory turnover, maintaining competitive pricing, and building a seamless supply chain were challenges. Success lies in understanding the entire lifecycle of your products, from sourcing to selling. Every detail matters. 

After BrandsClub I founded another company, similar to Groupon. It was called ClickOn and grew even faster. I helped them open Mexico and Argentina, to go from doing very few deals to tons of deals across tons of cities. I basically redid their sales operation. 

After BrandsClub you launched a DTC ecommerce - tell us aboutShoes4you:

Shoes4you was a private label fashion company focused on shoes, but we later expanded to bags, sunglasses, and watches. We were selling a monthly subscription, so you got a credit each month and could use it for any of our new collections. We had a new collection come out every month.

To promote it, we partnered with a celebrity called Flavia Allesandra, famous from the telenovelas popular in Brazil. She was basically the brand ambassador for the company. 

There was a similar business model in the US called Shoe Dazzle where Kim Kardashian was the celebrity representing them. Unfortunately this company didn't have good unit economics and after we sold something like 30,000 pairs of shoes, we decided that it was just not interesting enough of a business and decided to close down the company. 

What challenges did you face when running Shoes4you as an ecommerce business? 

This is very specific to Brazil, but there were a lot of challenges with the subscription model we had done there. Taxes in Brazil apply to your revenue, not your profit. So the subscription model-style business  had a lot of margin compression – it restricted how much you could spend on marketing, for example.  

We needed to spend money on marketing, and this was before content marketing was a thing. We needed to get recognized and to be able to get some brand impact. While we were very successful at doing this in business reviews – we were the darling of all of the business journals, we had a ton of press – we didn't really make it into the fashion world. So, what ends up happening when you don't have good brand visibility? Your conversion rate doesn’t convert. 

We had this conundrum where we would spend marketing dollars in order to acquire a customer and to get our name out there. But every time we spent any money, we didn't have enough margin to turn the marketing into profit. I would spend $100,000 in marketing, and make back only $90,000 in margin. If you run this to infinity, you go broke no matter what. It didn’t work, as a result.

What did you learn through these challenges? 

The brands who make it in Brazil are the ones who got profitable notoriety. Once you have notoriety and you establish your conversion rate so it can make sense, you can be successful. We didn't figure it out, but there are businesses who have. There’s a brand called Arezzo which is crushing it there and there's a number of other ones, like Havaiana. It's not because we were not successful that there are no people who can be successful. There is an expression that Brazil is not for beginners - with business taxation, logistics, regulations, and more being core challenges

It was also fairly early in ecommerce when we launched: there was no Amazon/FBA, there was no Third Party Logistics (3PL) that you plug into. We had to build our own logisticsl center.We had the fastest delivery in Sao Paulo: we could do same day delivery, which was very unique! It’s easier now, but it was definitely a big challenge then. 

Why did you launch a DTC ecommerce for shoes? What was the need in the market that you sought to fill?

Market size, basically. Shoes were a girl's best friend at the time. It was right around the release of the Sex and the City movies, and everybody was going crazy for shoes. There was a very big fashion craze for it. So, we saw there was an opportunity to be more creative, particularly where we saw people really looking to increase the number of shoe choices they had in their closet. 

They needed an affordable and fashionable brand at their disposal, where they could rely on the quality but maintain a lower cost. I don't remember what it would translate to precisely, but I believe we charged something around $49.99 USD for a pair of boots. 

What advice would you give ecommerce brands launching today?

1. Find your ecommerce customer niche

I would start in New York. It’s such a big market. It works really well to go after a niche, and niches in the US are enormous. For example, if you consider pickleball players being a niche, that's still a very, very big market. It’s a ‘millions and millions of people’ kind of niche. There are companies selling real Texas cowboy boots – that’s a niche, but it's still big enough to support one or multiple ecommerce brands. You end up having a much bigger audience, despite the fact that niches are much easier to serve. If you do this somewhere like France, the population of France is smaller than some American states, so it’s going to be much harder. 

2. Understand how your customers behave

The other key part is understanding how customers behave. Is there a product that is attracting the customer versus a product that customers are actually buying in high numbers? It’s common in fashion to have something a little bit extravagant that will attract the eyes and attract people, but when they actually buy, they buy something simpler. 

3. Understand the cost of bringing your business to market

What I would do is try to figure out my product mix based on what is attracting people and what people are actually buying. Tracking these early helps in creating the best product mix, because your business is going to live and die on your inventory turnover. What is going to be the sell through of your inventory? If you buy 100 units, how many of them are actually going to sell? Getting really smart on inventory turnover is absolutely key. Then the next thing is to understand the inventory life cycle. What percentage are you going to sell with no discount whatsoever? What percentage are you going to go and sell with some discount on your website? How many are you going to be selling or trying to get to a wholesaler or a retailer or an outlet? 

Test pricing and discounts to see what makes the most sense. Ultimately, whether you’re starting out or starting to scale, staying close to your customers and building a product mix they love is what will set the business apart. 

When he isn’t helping Clearco’s customers grow their own brands, Olivier is an avid tennis player, gamer, and reader who enjoys spending time with his cat, Napoleon.