w/ Louis Marty, Merci Handy
Interview with Louis Marty, co-founder and CEO of Merci Handy. In this episode, Louis discusses his experience building and growing a successful eCommerce business overseas, before expanding into North America. He shares his journey from building a custom website and creating a viral video, to discovering Shopify and eventually making the switch. Louis also discusses the challenges he faced along the way, and how he ultimately overcame them to achieve success.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
1/31/2023
Kurt Elster: On this show, we primarily hear about entrepreneurial journeys from North Americans, and it’s not something that happened intentionally or by design. I just assumed that’s what we attracted, that’s who we knew, that was our network. And oftentimes as brands grow and they scale, they’ll attempt an internationalization effort. They’ll start moving overseas. Cross-border commerce. Today, I want to flip that on its head. I want to hear from someone who has established a successful eCommerce Shopify business overseas, from outside North America, and then is looking to expand apparently quite successfully into North America.
And so, joining us today is Louis Marty from MerciHandy.com. I am sure I have gruesomely butchered that pronunciation. I am so sorry. But we’re gonna hear this story and we’re gonna get the pronunciation correct from someone who knows. I’m Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And this is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. Louis, welcome.
Louis Marty: Hi. Nice to meet you, Kurt.
Kurt Elster: Your name is Louis Marty. Not… Did I call you Louis? How badly did I screw this up?
Louis Marty: It was perfect. It’s Louis, like it’s a real French name. It was perfect.
Kurt Elster: Oh, it is?
Louis Marty: Yeah. Louis. Yeah. That’s it.
Kurt Elster: Okay. The name of your store is what?
Louis Marty: It’s called Merci, like merci in French, which means thank you. You know, merci. Handy. This one, you know. Handy because you have the word hand inside, but also because it’s meant like practical, and it was a perfect mix for us between a French word and a global word, so Merci Handy.
Kurt Elster: Oh, so from day one the intent here is to have a global audience.
Louis Marty: Day one. You know, when I started the business, day one, after my studies, I really wanted to build something global because I love U.S. brands, I love Chinese consumer brands, and yeah, I wanted to be global. And when we built our product and everything, yeah, we always… We think about the global consumer. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: All right, where are you now?
Louis Marty: So, we started our company in France, in Paris, where I’m born and I’m raised with my family, and we built… So, our main team is in Paris, in the heart of Paris, and we are sold now in 25 countries. I will say like 15 in Europe and the rest in the world. U.S., Canada, Mexico for America, and the rest is in Asia now.
Kurt Elster: All right. When did you start MerciHandy.com?
Louis Marty: So, we started now seven years ago. I finished my study. I was like 23 years old. The beginning of the story was I wanted to build a brand. I was fascinated by brands with strong communities, and I loved like Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream market. I was fascinated by Innocent Drinks, a U.K. company who disrupts the juice and smoothie industry thanks to a good product, of course, but also a different marketing, a different way to speak with consumers, to be consumer centric. And I’ve made an internship in a really big, famous Spanish fragrance company called Puig, and we spent like six months to a brand new Instagram account, because we wanted to speak with agency, and test everything, and be sure of the next 90 posts of the world, and I was like, “Wow.” It’s not the way that I think business should be run now, and brands should be run. You have to iterate. You have to test. You have to go faster into the market.
So, I started my company.
Kurt Elster: I love that Ben & Jerry’s, of all things, was a big inspiration. It is a really cool brand who’s had quite the impact. Have you ever… They do tours of their factory in New England. I think it’s in Vermont. Have you ever been?
Louis Marty: No, I’ve never been. I would love, but I loved, like when we start, the ice market industry, ice cream, it’s huge, and they say, “Okay, can we disrupt this industry without a ton of money when we start?” And we try… Want to do the same in the personal care industry, where it’s like trust by billion dollar companies and big P & G, Unilever, L'Oréal , of course. So, when we start, you say, “What can I crack?” Is it product? Is it the market? Is it the channel? Or everything? And community is something that we definitely cracked. We have over two million followers on our social media now, and of course, we drive all this traffic to our Shopify.
Kurt Elster: Well, I think the thing we’ve skipped over is what does Merci Handy sell?
Louis Marty: So, we start with hand sanitizer, which is crazy. I was not a visionary with COVID, but I wanted to start with the most ordinary, boring product, and because the vision we have and the mission, it’s to make the ordinary extraordinary. So, we chose the first product as hand sanitizer. The market in Europe was really, really boring, like it’d smell of Vodka and dry your hands, you know? And the market was all the same, so we said, “Okay, let’s bring color. Let’s bring natural stuff inside. Let’s bring cool ingredients, sustainable packaging,” and then said, “Let’s change the channel of distribution,” because the product was only in pharmacies, and I will say drug stores in Europe, and we built a real brand, and no one knew a brand of hand sanitizer. You know, you just buy the classic one.
In U.S., the market was different, but in Europe, definitely we met some tests, and it was just like classic brands and… So, we changed all the rules of the game. We build a brand, launch a website and Instagram of hand sanitizer brands. We call Sephora. We call beauty retailer, lifestyle retailer to say, “Hey, we are cool. We are the hand sanitizer. Let’s do something together.” And you know, at the beginning they were shocked about the brand of hand sanitizer, and after a few years, and after COVID of course, we sold millions of units each year.
So, it was with that.
Kurt Elster: When you launched the website in the hand sanitizer, it sounds like you’d finished school, your background, it sounds like you studied business, right?
Louis Marty: Yeah. I studied business and my last internship, like in France when you finish your business study you have to do what we call an internship in a company, and I asked my director to say, “I don’t want to go into L’Oréal, or Pepsi, or Coca-Cola, whatever, to do an internship. I want to build my company.” So, he said yes. I hire two of my teammates, classmates, to make the internship, and we launch a website. It wasn’t a Shopify. It was my first big mistake. In my company, I put when we start like 20K. 10K from myself, I asked my family, and 10K from my co-founder. And we do a video on YouTube. We make like two million views. It was really fun. Two million views. We were on 9GAG, we were on Buzzfeed, like really, really cool growth on this video, and we do like one sale on our website, and we were like-
Kurt Elster: Oh, no!
Louis Marty: And we invest 10K on our website because we didn’t use Shopify. Seven years ago, Shopify in France was not so famous. To be honest, they really grew after. I had an advisor who took me, okay, didn’t like this website, go into Shopify, and let’s start again. And it was like we lose 7K on our 20K of capital with a really bad from scratch website, so…
Kurt Elster: Out of curiosity, what platform was it on?
Louis Marty: We built it. Now, to say this, it was really like our platform. We did everything-
Kurt Elster: Oh, you built a custom platform?
Louis Marty: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was crazy, you know?
Kurt Elster: You didn’t know what you were getting into, did you?
Louis Marty: No. No, no. I had no idea. Now it’s funny, but I promise you when I was a student in France, all the CMS, all the Shopify, everything, it was not so famous. Now when you want to build a website everyone is thinking about Shopify or competitor, but I promise you when I start, I was like, “Okay. I want a website. I will pay. I will ask a developer and maybe…” Yeah. Really bad move.
Kurt Elster: All right, so you get this custom website built, and you manage to get a viral video, which is not an easy-
Louis Marty: Super viral.
Kurt Elster: … thing to do.
Louis Marty: No.
Kurt Elster: That’s the thing everybody… Everyone who writes a case study or business plan, it’s like, “All right, step one. Be famous.” And easier said than done, but you managed to do it with the viral video. Unfortunately, it did not translate to sales.
Louis Marty: No. Zero. Definitely. We do like 100K visitors and literally one sale or two sales. Because the experience, everything was bad. The payment experience, the checkout, everything, everything was bad. And one guy called [inaudible] who’s a strong entrepreneur in the internet in France literally deleted all the code of my website and said, “Go to Shopify.” And I think we were like in the top… We start with Shopify. They should have one or two customers in France. We were one of the first brands in Shopify in France.
Kurt Elster: So, someone recommended Shopify to you. That’s how you found it?
Louis Marty: Yeah. Someone really focused into the U.S. market and Canadian market, of course, but someone recommended Shopify. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And at that time, did they have a French language version where they’re like-
Louis Marty: No. Everything was in English. Yeah. Everything was in English, and it was… Today, they have a strong ecosystem. Of course, in U.S., you have a really strong ecosystem around Shopify with all the apps, logistics, 3P logistics, everything is connected, but when I start my business and I ask supplier, third party logistics, do you know Shopify? Do you have easy integration with Shopify? They didn’t know about Shopify. They all knew about WordPress, or PrestaShop, the French competitor. But now, when you go into a third party logistics in France and you say, “I have a Shopify,” it takes like one day to integrate products. Yeah. It’s perfect.
Kurt Elster: So, you have that viral success that doesn’t translate into sales. We think it’s because the website is just that difficult and bad. Someone recommends Shopify. You switch to Shopify. Certainly, probably took more effort with at the time not having a French language version. That has since changed. And from there, how do you recover? Does getting on Shopify, do you still have that long tail of traffic? Or what do you do then?
Louis Marty: We built community. It was like how we can from this viral video build a community, so we start on Facebook. Not Instagram, but really on Facebook. The first three years was a lot of fans, with a lot of jokes, and built community. We have a Facebook page with a half-million persons right now. We don’t post anymore. Since two years, we didn’t post. As you know, it’s quite dead for organic stuff on Facebook, on Meta, but yeah, we built communities, and we switch into Instagram, and of course now we’re on TikTok with one million followers on all around content on TikTok.
My story with Shopify, it’s exactly the same with TikTok. When I start on TikTok, everything was in Chinese. It wasn’t translated. So, I think if you want to be a great entrepreneur, you have to be an early adopter and try tools and stuff really at the beginning, when… If you want a competitive advantage with the other. And Shopify during the first two years was for us in France really, really a competitive advantage, because it was faster, it was easier, it was cheaper than all other solutions in the French market.
Kurt Elster: And at the time, it’s funny, probably… Geez, at this point 12 years ago. 12, 13 years ago. We were moving into eCommerce, but we used multiple platforms and one of the platforms we liked for self-hosted was PrestaShop. PrestaShop is French. You’re familiar with this thing?
Louis Marty: Never tried PrestaShop, and I am a baby of Shopify. I love Shopify. I live Shopify. But no, I don’t know. I know some brands now are still on PrestaShop, but to be honest, I know more brands who are moving from PrestaShop to Shopify for a lot of different reasons, like ecosystem, integration, and speed. Lot of different things.
Kurt Elster: Well, just not having to host the thing yourself. No, one of our earliest eCommerce clients we set up on PrestaShop, successful client, few years ago we moved them to Shopify Plus and their immediate reaction was, “We should have done this sooner.” Yeah. So, similar experience there.
Okay, so you’ve got through organic social media content you’re able to grow and get sales and revenue, build a multimillion person audience, which is not easy at all, and you jumped through… You’ve moved platform to platform, like Facebook pages, not particularly useful anymore. Moved to Instagram. Instagram still works pretty well. Then TikTok’s the hot thing and it sounds like you got on that early. But you sell hand sanitizer. How do you consistently create compelling, engaging content around hand sanitizer? Glorious, beautiful hand sanitizer though it may be.
Louis Marty: Yeah, so of course we developed new product. Now we are a more personal care brand. But during four years, we were a mono product. We only sold hand sanitizer. So, different size, different shape, a lot of different partnerships. We partnered with Disney. We partnered with Netflix Stranger Things around a hand sanitizer. We do some collabs. So, it was super hot, and of course during COVID we jumped into COVID and we created a new site, we had a new communication. It wasn’t fun. It was like vital and it was like super important to have stock. And normally, we do jokes with our hand sanitizer, and in 2020 we didn’t make jokes around hand sanitizer because we were out of stock. So, I think our creativity in the product, in product development, it’s something where we spend the most time in the company. We love collaboration, and to create synergies between brands, or between shows as we do with Netflix and Stranger Things, we are the first beauty brand to partner with them, and it was huge. For us, it was huge.
Kurt Elster: Tell me about these brand collabs, because I love the idea of if you have a product, especially a consumable good, like hand sanitizer, where you need people to make repeat purchases, doing limited editions of it and unique variations on the product they already love gives people an excuse to buy, where they’re like, “I would love to buy more.” And brand collabs really make this easy and help introduce you to new audiences. And you’ve got… Saying this out loud, it’s hand sanitizer and Stranger Things. Hearing it out loud, it doesn’t make sense. But seeing it, you have absolutely made it work. Talk to me about that experience. Because I’ve heard Netflix, not necessarily the easiest folks to deal with. It’s a big organization.
Louis Marty: Yeah. It was hard. Why we do this, I wanted to crack the U.S. market, and when I learned the U.S. I said, “I have no money. I don’t have millions to invest in billboards, in TV, in social ads. I have to think about something huge that a lot of my audience in America, which is gen Z, know, watch, so I need a collaboration.” It was the easiest thing for me to penetrate the market with strong messages. I watched the show. It was in 2020 during COVID, definitely, when I was at home. I’d never watched before and I said, “Well, there is something which makes sense between Netflix and Stranger Things and us.” This world, these characters, the young people, all this color, I love the ordinary and extraordinary world in Stranger Things when you go into the upside down, so I’m an entrepreneur, I have no limits, I’m super ambitious, so I say, “Let’s send a message to Netflix.”
I go into LinkedIn, I message one or two people at Netflix. I’ve got an answer. They say, “Okay.” We just talked collaboration, licensing, partnership, whatever you call it, and let’s do a meeting, a creative meeting, and we start to build. Season four was coming and they were super impressed by our creativity and how our two brands can work together. And we made it. After six months of development and huge launch, and a lot of Americans, of our U.S. consumers, know us thanks to Stranger Things and now then switch into our catalog products, you know?
Kurt Elster: So, you sent a cold pitch on LinkedIn to two people on Netflix and six months later you got this brand collab launched? That’s quite incredible.
Louis Marty: Yeah. Yes. I mean, I always try like this. When I want to call someone, I try to contact this person, then their assistant, then their intern. I don’t know. I always try to contact the real person and you never know. If I explain to Netflix, “Oh, you want to start collaboration.” I read a lot of quotes on internet how Netflix wants to start licensing like their competitor, like this and everything, so I said, “Maybe it can be a nice idea that a new season is coming, 2020, the new season of Stranger Things is coming in 2021. They should have a strong program about licensing and everything.” Yeah, we made it. We made it.
Kurt Elster: So, that’s like… It’s clear that’s the big one. That seems to be your baby. But you also have brand collabs with other big brands, and Disney, who’s bigger than Netflix.
Louis Marty: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Talk to me about that experience. Disney, obviously hard to deal with when someone has to be that protective of intellectual property, but at the same time Disney also very used to licensing. That is a big part of the business. Which one was easier, Netflix or Disney?
Louis Marty: Totally different because Disney, it’s crazy. They contacted us. It was in 2018, so two years after our launch, they contacted us.
Kurt Elster: They reached out to you.
Louis Marty: I was shocked. Yes. They reached me also on LinkedIn, so LinkedIn is for me super, super important. They reached me and they said, literally, I’m not joking, “We are a little bit tired of working with big brands, with P&G and everything. We are looking to acquire new customers with new brands, new digital niche brand. We love your brand. We think we can do something together.” And we had a meeting, so it was only in Europe, not in U.S., because we were younger, not launched in U.S., but it was huge also.
You know, they start, they contacted us because they wanted to do a collaboration with a new film, with a new movie, and I say, “No, I want the classic one, like Minnie, Mickey, the real family of Disney.” And we made it, and it was huge online. Huge, huge, huge. And we opened thanks to Disney U.K. and Germany, two big markets in Europe. Thanks to Disney, we acquired new customers, and we grew a lot.
Kurt Elster: So, with these brand collabs, do the brands generally support the launch? Or they say, “Hey, we licensed it to you. That’s your advantage. Now it’s up to you to market it.”
Louis Marty: Exactly. No, it’s up to you. They contact us because I think we are super creative. I always try to catch new business. Sometimes I will say, “Let’s speak about Disney,” but of course I say, “Hey, we have a license with you. Let’s go into Disneyland Resort.” So, I open also new business. Netflix and Stranger Things, they have opened like five popup stores in U.S. Huge ones. New York, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and new are coming, and we are here, so we use them to grow, and we are sold in the stores, and with money also, so it’s a big win-win for all of us.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, you’re right. I didn’t think of that. They would also need… They need merchandise, often these brands, for physical retail locations, and for Disney those are the resorts, and believe me, there’s merchandise everywhere.
Louis Marty: Everywhere.
Kurt Elster: And certainly, Netflix did these super cool Stranger Things popups. And so, not only do you get the eyes and the impressions, you’re exposed to entirely new people through this, and in the process you’re getting paid for it. They’re selling your product. Putting it on their shelves. That’s very exciting.
Louis Marty: Exactly. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: That obviously is very beneficial. The other thing you’ve done is now it’s more than just hand sanitizer. The obvious extension to hand sanitizer would be you’re either going into cleaning goods or you’re going into skincare, and clearly you went to skincare, not Windex.
Louis Marty: Yeah. Yeah. We went into skincare and personal care. We start with old products with a handbag, so until COVID we sold hand cream, face mists, blotting paper, really what we call beauty products, beauty to go products, minis and more, like really small product, always lower than $10, and during COVID, you know, in 2020, just before COVID, before it starts, we say, “Oh, we have a problem with our average order value,” which is a big thing of course online, and we ask our community. We send a lot of Typeforms. We sent thousands of Typeforms and surveys each month to our consumer base to ask them what do you want, what do you want to see in terms of products, in terms of marketing, in terms of innovation, and skincare, skincare, acne, acne, acne. A lot of people are saying we are still missing something for us for our skin and for our skincare routine.
So, it was a big challenge, a big bet. We changed some stuff in our brand to be more skincare, I would say. We changed a little bit our logo. We changed our website. We changed two, three things who allowed us to be an established skincare brand now, and it was a good bet because now it’s 40% of our sales, so super exciting.
Kurt Elster: So, you knew you needed to expand, because selling individual to-go hand sanitizer, you’re right, it’s low average order value, and doing the brand collabs, and the bundles, and all the limited editions obviously helps with customer lifetime value and AOV a little bit, but you have to expand, and I love the brilliance of, “Hey, this is a to-go item. It goes in your bag.” What else goes with it in the bag? And that’s where you start expanding.
But the ideas all came from it sounds like you do monthly surveys. Use Typeform as the tool. Typeform is fabulous. And you survey people, and you just flat out ask them, hey, what do you want to see? And then whatever that top answer is, that’s what you’re going with?
Louis Marty: Exactly. Definitely. And then we have a club of hundreds of people, and we send them every month some samples of… We had with our team like, “Oh, we want to launch this deodorant. What do you think? We want to launch this acne patch. What do you think? We want to launch it.” And we are always iterating with our consumer, and we test a lot, and without testing I’m nothing. To be honest, when we start, it was harder than this. I used to do fake landing page with fake product just to see the CVR and to see the add to cart rate, but now we are too big to do this, but if I launch a new business I will do this.
Kurt Elster: What did you do with the… So, you put together a landing page that fully works but for a product that does not necessarily exist yet.
Louis Marty: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: As a proof of concept.
Louis Marty: No, fake. I don’t know. I want to launch a deodorant. I do a fake 3D. I do some ads. And you don’t need 10K to test. You know, with a few hundred dollars you can test. You do a fake ad with a USP, a unique selling proposition, and you check how many people click on the ad, how many people, like the bounce rate and everything, and you can compare really easily two products. And I remember when we started to launch new products, we made this, and some people were super frustrated because when you add to cart and we go to check out, it was like, “Oh, this is a test. Thank you so much. Please find a promo code for our actual collection.” And we received some email from people. Super, super disappointing, and frustrating, and sometimes angry because they wanted the product, and they don’t want to be like in a panel.
Kurt Elster: All right, I love that idea as a great… It’s one thing to ask people, “Hey, what do you want to buy?” And then, “Hey, would you buy this?” It is entirely separate to say, “Pull out your wallet and pay for this.” That’s when you find out the reality. And that’s the brilliance of the landing page for a fake product. And then obviously it’s annoying for people that you have to go cancel the orders, or do something with it, but as long as you limited it, it could be… I think it's a valuable and worthwhile tool.
So, you’re in a unique position to do some cultural compare and contrast. Are there any cultural differences when it comes to marketing, or the eCommerce website, or customer service, that surprised you between Europe and North America, or France and the U.S.?
Louis Marty: A lot. A lot. It’s totally different. Average order value is different. In U.S., it’s two times bigger. I have no idea… Yeah. I have no idea why. Maybe because of our shipping rates, but our conversion is a little bit lower, so because maybe we are lack of awareness, and I think in U.S., in Europe we are targeting really the gen Z, when our actual customer in U.S., it’s a little bit older. So, maybe they love more… I think U.S. people are more fun, and they love more color, and they love more… It’s different. And it’s why we really want to invest now in U.S. and scale, because we have really good KPI, and really good metrics on our website. I didn’t spend money on U.S. right now. It’s just organic orders. I literally-
Kurt Elster: Oh, wow.
Louis Marty: Yeah. I don’t spend money on Facebook and Instagram. Just organic orders from Stranger Things, from some PR, from some influence marketing, from social media of course. But today, no targeting. No one.
Kurt Elster: And tell me… Let’s talk about some of the tools here, because setting up a website to sell internationally, cross border, different languages, it’s hard. It’s a lot of work. How the heck are you doing it?
Louis Marty: Yeah. Shopify Markets was not present. It wasn’t on the market. So, Shopify Payments, neither. Shopify Payments was in U.S. but just arrived in November 2022 in France. So, it’s really young. So, today we’re on Shopify Plus, and we have three different websites. We have our French website in Europe. We have one English website with pounds, and because we have different logistics in U.S. and also our claims are a little bit different in U.S., we need to have another U.S. store. So, now we have literally three different stores, which is really hard for our team because when you create a product, you have to create on three stores, and of course you-
Kurt Elster: You then triple the amount of work you do.
Louis Marty: Exactly. You have to triple everything. It’s easier for analytics, like for Google, and because all this is really clear, but it’s a lot of work. Now that Shopify Markets is on the market in France, we are going to do a little bit different. We still have this problem of regulation with FDA that our claims in U.S. and in U.K. and in Europe are different that we will keep one U.S. market. But ourselves, allow it to do it, so it’s fine.
Kurt Elster: So, the current system you’re running is one store per region.
Louis Marty: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: And then you put those on a subdomain. So, the main store, the French store, is MerciHandy.com, but then the U.S. store would be us.MerciHandy.com.
Louis Marty: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And then the newer feature set that Shopify offers is Shopify Markets, that solves a lot of this, where you run a single store, but it has the multiple languages, and the multiple currencies, and payments, and shipping rules are all set up in the one store, and it still has the different subdomains, but it knows to swap through them. So, it helps ease up some of that duplicate work that you have to go through.
Louis Marty: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: And then, so it sounds like you started this effort before Shopify Markets was available, and now you’re gonna jump to headless?
Louis Marty: Yeah. We are going to jump to headless because every week we receive email from people saying that we want a app, we want a app. We love to buy with the app. And I say no, it’s not our job to build an app and to do downloads. We sell product. We don’t sell downloads. So, it’s great to have an app, but we don’t have enough product. We are not like H&M, or Nike, or whatever, but I don’t want to do an app. And today, our conversion rate between desktop and mobile are really, really, really different when 90% of our traffic is from mobile.
So, I had this opportunity with actually a French company who made YC, Y Combinator, who create a headless program with Shopify, and-
Kurt Elster: All right, which one? Plug it. Let’s hear.
Louis Marty: It’s called Once, Once App. And it’s called Once. They have three customers. They choose three French customers. Three big eCommerce companies. And we launch in January, but what I do now, what I see and what we are working, we are working since August on it. It’s crazy. You can swipe. It’s like TikTok. Our website, which will be a website, not an app, will be like TikTok. Definitely like you can swipe, you have full page, full screen pages. You can swipe on the bottom. It’s really like an app and to be honest, 80% of the features that we will have, it wasn’t possible on just Shopify right now, so it’s why we decided to move on the headless.
Kurt Elster: With headless, what we’re talking about is you have Shopify remains the-
Louis Marty: Back office.
Kurt Elster: The hub. The backend. But the online store channel in Shopify is no longer used and in place of it you’re using a separate solution, and that’s why it’s called headless, because we have removed… If the online store is the head of Shopify, we’re taking that part out and now we’re using a separate application for it. And then they talk back and forth. And so, you give up some of the online store features of Shopify. Not all of them. Often apps and stuff you give up. And then in its place, you get this headless solution that will offer more and more stuff.
And Shopify has their own version of this called Hydrogen and we’ve got… And then there’s other solutions for it. It sounds like what you’re building, though, is like this very mobile, gen Z centric, super cool version of the site. When do you think that’ll go live? I want to see this.
Louis Marty: January. Definitely. It’s almost done but with like Friday, and holiday season, it’s really big, so we are moving 3PL, so it was too many changes. In Europe. So, it was too many changes at the same time, so we will first change our logistics and then our… Still, Shopify is perfect for headless. I mean, for me it was a no brainer to stay on Shopify. We are still super, super, super happy on Shopify, but we wanted a front website close to an app. It was the opportunity… We will do a catch up and I will give you some data about conversion rate, but yeah, gen Z, it’s because our… I mean, the first reason is definitely because of the mobile conversion.
Kurt Elster: And you said hey, mobile, desktop, our conversion rates were way different even though traffic was 90% mobile. If I had to guess, mobile was… Was it half or like two thirds of desktop conversion rate?
Louis Marty: My conversion rate on desktop, you can divide it by three on mobile.
Kurt Elster: Okay. All right, I can see why you’d look for a solution.
Louis Marty: Yeah. A lot of stuff. We did not have Apple Pay. We bring a lot of mobile payment stuff, easier, but it’s still… It’s a bet. I know that I will have, to be honest… I’m confident because I know that my conversion rate will be really, really better, but I know that I would have more expenses, like more development, more cost of… Yeah, more cost of labor because it’s not that easy, that Shopify front, but at the end when I do my profit and loss, I want to invest in headless.
Kurt Elster: I can see why. It sounds great. Okay. I need to check out this Stranger Things hand sanitizer. Where do I go to get it?
Louis Marty: Merci Handy, right now, in Stranger Things store. We partner with Ulta also, but now they… I mean, we removed the collection. Now us.MerciHandy.com, and you are receiving like 48 hours, so yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay, cool. us.MerciHandy.com, and I will include that in the show notes. Louis, this has been phenomenal. I am so glad to have heard your story. You’ve had this incredible growth. And you had a harder time than someone starting at the same time in the United States. There were some handicaps there that would have slowed you down. And yet you’ve had just this utterly tremendous growth. Hearing you tell it, you made it sound easy, and I know it was anything but. It’s like, “Well, gee. I should go open an international hand sanitizer store.”
But I don’t want to be tearing all my hair out is the other issue there, so I think maybe I’ll hold off on that one.
Louis Marty: It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of patience. It’s a lot of mistakes. It’s a lot of emotion, also, but yeah, stay happy, stay positive, and a little bit foolish. I’m a foolish guy, so yeah.
Kurt Elster: Louis Marty, MerciHandy.com, thank you so much.
Louis Marty: Merci beaucoup. Merci, Kurt.
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