'Power has transitioned': Axel Arigato's founders on the importance of listening to customers
The Glossy Podcast · with Albin Johansson and Max Svärdh · December 16, 2020 · 36 min
Summary
Axel Arigato's founders share their journey from identifying a gap in the footwear market to building a comprehensive lifestyle brand by prioritizing customer feedback. They discuss their international expansion strategy, including recent store openings and plans for the US market, and the impact of a significant private equity investment to fuel future growth. This episode emphasizes the power of a customer-centric approach in scaling a D2C brand.
Key takeaways
Identify market gaps by questioning existing pricing and value propositions (e.g., Axel Arigato questioning footwear costs).
Strategically expand product categories beyond your initial offering to build brand awareness and capture a wider market.
Prioritize customer feedback and insights as a core driver for product development and brand evolution.
Consider international expansion strategically, leveraging both physical retail and online channels to build a global presence.
Understand how private equity investment can accelerate growth and market penetration for scaling D2C brands.
Axel Arigato co-founders Albin Johansson and Max Svärdh have worked from the bottom-up, in the literal sense.
"The footwear market -- that's where we saw the gap," Svärdh said on the Glossy Podcast.
"How can a shoe cost this much? We couldn't understand that," Johansson added.
But like many companies that start out with just one kind of product, shoes were just the entry point into a broader slate of products, which now include head-to-toe clothing items and a range of accessories. "This is where we'll create, hopefully, some brand awareness, and then we'll explore with other categories," Svärdh said about the founders' reasoning when launching the brand in 2014.
Despite an ongoing pandemic, the Swedish company has opened two new stores in Germany in recent weeks, and has one in Dubai planned for the first quarter of 2021.
Last month, private equity firm Eurazeo took a majority stake in the company, to the tune of a $66.1 million (56 million euro) investment.
The United States is one massive market it could turn to next. Online sales from the U.S. make up close to 10% of the brand's digital total, Svärdh estimated.
