Even if we think social media world is very mature or has less business opportunities than before, here we have a recent successful startup from Spain, basically spending his budget on Facebook ads.
Story
A year ago, four young entrepreneurs launched their own brand of sunglasses, Hawkers. They now sell their wares in over 50 countries, have a turnover of more than 15 million euros, and employ a workforce of 40. They have produced for Mercedes Benz and PayPal, and their sunglasses are worn by national and international celebrities such as Paula Echevarría, Usher and Dani Alves. Not forgetting that they have become the "first Spanish company" to sponsor a team from the NBA, in this case, the Los Angeles Lakers.
eCommorce and Social media
When the founder used his last $300 to start the company, he had a prototype, and a simple website. Knowing he wanted pricing to stay low, he decided to sell exclusively online. At the time Facebook ads were getting a lot of negative press so testing out the algorithm as fast as they could to see what would generate the most sales seemed completely reckless. But they did it anyway. The "spray and pray"approach rarely works, but within weeks the Hawkers social media pages were exploding, sales began to skyrocket, and customer acquisition was pennies on the dollar.
Their commitment to eCommerce has been based on social media, with Facebook playing the leading role. Using "reverse engineering", they have managed to optimize their online advertising and reach levels undreamt of – to the point that Mark Zuckerberg’s company invited them to tell their success story to his team of engineers at their headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Strategy – Reverse Engineering (trial campaigns).
Online commerce fitted into their mission like a jigsaw piece. "It’s allowed us to reach more customers without the need to accept conditions set by middlemen", points out Iñaki Soriano, one of the co-founders. If they have had an ally on their adventure, however, it has undoubtedly been the social networking site par excellence. "We wanted to reach out to a wider public through social media, and Facebook has become an indispensable tool for achieving that", says Pablo Sánchez, another of the co-founders.
Hawkers’ strategy has been based on "mathematics". "The more people you reach out to, the better chance you have of telling them about your idea. And Facebook allows you to do that on a small budget", Sánchez points out. As the entrepreneurs admit, although there is now a trend to make the most of the advertising support provided by this social networking site, "very few small businesses" were exploiting this channel a year ago. Which is why, with their software-engineering know-how, they had to resort to a classic trial-and-error approach in order to maximize their impact. "We launched a lot of trial campaigns and we would carry out some reverse engineering based on the results", Sánchez underlines. "We tried to find out how the Facebook algorithm worked, depending on the variability of the results."
Second- Highest number of likes in sunglasses world
This system has positioned Hawkers as "the sunglasses brand with the second-highest number of likes in the world", behind Ray-Ban but with over 2.6 million likes. The results even surprised Facebook itself, which last November showcased the team from the Spanish company as a performance success story at a conference with their engineers.
Raul Garcia Mur
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