THE DATA MINERS

12 years ago, Funiglobal was founded in Spain by ceo, Carlos Larraz, and his business partner, as an online retailer. During that relatively short time, the company has grown to become a supplier and licensee, posting €26 million in sales last year. PPE chats to Carlos about the journey so far, and what’s next for Funiglobal.

From the very beginning of Funiglobal, the company’s presence has been global, but the focus is very much on European territories. Ceo, Carlos Larraz, tells us: “We opened a lot of different domains, websites all over Europe, in fact all over the world. But now, around 95% of sales are in Europe, including the UK.

“Something we do very differently to others is that we have our own warehouses in Spain, France, Germany, Sweden and we have just opened in the UK to start doing business more seriously because since Brexit, it’s been difficult.”

Around six years ago, Carlos and his business partner moved from the model of selling third party products, and began to develop their own collections and today the majority of the company is its own items with many licensed ranges.

Funiglobal has agreements in place with the majority of major licensors, including Paramount, Universal, Netflix, Warner Bros, Hasbro and more, with around 16 partnerships in place.

These lines are sold direct to consumer, with only a very small part of the business in the B2B arena. Carlos says: “We are trying to think about B2B again, because we have a really good range of our own, especially licensed.”

Future plans also involve a move outside of costumes. Carlos furthers:

“90% of the business is the Halloween part, like costumes, accessories and so on. But we’ve start doing some business with party supplies and some general categories like bathrobes, slippers, pyjamas, etc, with small pieces of licensing. But they are on our website, which is a website for costumes and it’s a different customer. So it’s something we have to work on, and in the next year we’re probably going to separate units and test those categories.”

Being able to successfully move across different categories in this way, into different territories, and to react to trends, is largely down to the focus Funiglobal places on data and analysis.

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Carlos explains: “I would say we’re basically an IT company, because the thing we do best, apart from logistics, is data analysis. We try to understand where the market in going, how to predict demand and so on.”

All of this is done internally with a staff of around 60. “For example we started selling on Amazon just two years ago. We were analysing the data because there’s a lot of software you can have to understand the trends, even when you’re not selling on there.

“So we are people that analyse a lot. Everything. On Google as well, we analyse the keyword searching tool and it’s amazing the information it can provide. So we mix it internally, then we detect the trends.

“At the beginning we used to work with agencies, but we’ve done it internally for around nine years and we have a lot of technology developed to do things like increasing, decreasing automatically depending on certain facts like stock levels.”

The DIY ethos carries across the whole business. Carlos furthers: “We work with 3PLs in the logistics part, but the WMS - warehouse management system - is ours. It’s implemented in every warehouse, so we control everything.

“We learned from experience because in the past it was a third party WMS and we collapsed twice because of our growth. So for six years we have used our own software and it’s the best performance ever, the best KPIs ever, because it’s our technology. So every time we detect anything out of normal performance, we see it immediately and react accordingly.”

Analysis of the market has led Funiglobal to run a small part of its business via Amazon and other marketplaces. Carlos tells us: “It’s obviously growing. So it is something we are controlling very well because we are just doing our own brands. I don’t sell third party items on Amazon, I’m not into price wars, so we’re just doing step by step. I think it’s definitely a trend and it’s growing overall, but it’s dependent on the country.

“Also, with all the new regulations the EU is implementing for Amazon control mean the prices on Amazon will be higher, because Amazon will put all the taxes on us as retailers and as we want our margins, prices will go up. At a certain point, people will notice that Amazon is not as cheap any more, not like it used to be.”

While Amazon is particularly strong in the UK and Germany, other platforms, such as Bol.com in Holland, are prolific in other territories. Funiglobal has plans to better understand territory-specific idiosyncrasies over coming years.

Carlos expands: “I think we are a company that is not very big on any specific market. So we are focusing on how to grow each specific market, because, the way we started the company and the way we’ve grown it was on a very global basis with very global marketing and we picked the marketing that works for everyone.”

Funiglobal may be pushing the boundaries with a very different business model to many in the sector, but there’s a clear plan in place, and if the journey so far is anything to go by, there’s still much to see from this business.