Irene Hartmann
07/10/2020 - 7:00
- Clarín.com
- Society
"Business is going well for us because today life is reduced to Internet connection + Netflix + taking care of our dog or cat ." It is a subjective vision and Pablo Franco knows it. He runs a small pet food chain and understands that, compared to other merchants, fortune was on his side. Or is it that, as if the coronavirus were a sinister Darwinian game, he knew how to adapt better than others to the new reality, that fatal mamushka of events, ranging from the pandemic to an economic debacle with nearly 27,000 businesses that could close alone? In Buenos Aires city? Without the backs of the e-commerce giants, who are they and what a twist were the small merchants who are surviving and eventually self-improving in the middle of the quarantine?
Franco is managing partner and director of Kangoo Pet Food (kangoopet.com.ar). 25 years ago he does what he does. It runs five stores between the city of Buenos Aires and Ramos Mejía. He markets pets (he likes to say "pets"), balanced foods, accessories, and medications. At the end of the talk he will say: "The online growth we had now was expected for five or six years from now."
The accelerated time is something that Clarín has been analyzing for a long time. Especially through talks with Gustavo Sambucetti, institutional director of the Argentine Chamber of Electronic Commerce (CACE), a sector that only in April (and beware that retailing was enabled only on the 20th of that month) grew, in turnover, 84 %. On purchase orders, almost40%. In units, 71%. " Four out of ten purchases came from new customers, " said Sambucetti, before auctioning off: "In two months two years passed. I'm not talking about volume but about the maturation of supply and demand ”.
Pablo Franco, director of Kangoo Pet Food, has several stores down the street, where he sells food and other items for pets. Due to the coronavirus quarantine, it is fully focused on monitoring and coordinating its online sales.
Clarín asked Mariano Otálora, director of the Argentina School of Finance, for a brief glimpse of Argentine commercial life in the context of a mandatory isolation that turned the sector upside down.
"The native e-commerce channels are working at full capacity because they already had a structure prepared for that type of demand. But there are businesses that are billing 20% and had to go through a reconversion that involved building their online sales channel. Others went fully into e-commerce. I think those who were more prepared today have a clear advantage over those who were not, "he explained.
A case of " those who do not " is that of Florencia Lizziero, in charge of a family business that she is taking to the lung: Cabaña Piedras Blancas, a gourmet cheese factory born in 1992, based in Suipacha. The business fall in these months was resounding: “Thirty families depend on us. We produce and market special French, Italian, goat, cow and sheep cheeses. Our main market is gastronomic: restaurants, catering companies, hotels made up 70% of the sale. All of that fell in March. In April we sold less than 50% of normal ”.
Then they materialized the saying that the kicks in the butt throw you forward : “The pandemic killed us, but, being a small company and young driving, I suppose we could be versatile. We realized that we had to reinvent ourselves to save ourselves from the fall . So, in a week, in record time, we launched an online store (tienda.piedrasblancas.com.ar). It is a project that we had, but we never specified because we had more or less stable sales ”.
"It is that in SMEs, the urgent always wins over the important", evaluated Lizziero, and concluded: "I think we found a way. We are not a success story because we are not doing better at all, but internally it was important to be able to hit the fly ”.
Visionaries
The obligation against the need and the need for the health contingency are breaking a very hard path for a majority of merchants who fail to stand up. On the consumer side, Otálora explained that “thousands are entering the online shopping for the first time. They do it out of obligation, so as not to expose themselves. But, although some of this will change, obviously the face-to-face purchase will not disappear . It happens that for many businesses, e-commerce is an opportunity to compensate for losses, including the advantage of avoiding the expenses that a place on the street implies ”.
The extreme of these advantages is the "pope" of electronic commerce: "It is crazy (Otálora said) ... today Mercado Libre is valued at almost 50,000 million dollars. It is ten times what YPF is worth or what all the banks of the Argentine financial system are worth ”.
Free Market employees.
Returning to the world of food, an example of resilience in the pandemic is Mr. Pan. Eduardo Crespo has been leading this frozen food distributor based in La Plata for more than 20 years. They are about 15 employees. We had to open the fan, "he said.
“Many of our buyers (school, hospital, bar, and restaurant buffets) closed due to the coronavirus, so sales fell dramatically. Due to the economic crisis we already had the idea of trying to reach the final consumer, so we said 'let's accelerate it' ”.
What did you do? “We started in an artisanal way, with WhatsApp lists and now we are adding new products, such as dairy products, and we accelerated everything with the opening of an online store (tienda.mrpan.com). We just started, so it doesn't have the necessary traction, but we are on the road. ”
Basilio Holik, from the Holik Group custom furniture factory, also said he was “walking”: “I am 34 years of profession. I started with my dad and my brother and six years ago we went to the industrial pole of Ezeiza. We sell to individuals and companies that do construction. We are about 12 people ”.
Basilio Holik runs a custom furniture factory. He expressed the opinion that, due to the quarantine caused by the coronavirus, "many are using the weights to make spare parts or remodeling."
The coronavirus symbolically got into his business: “We always sold online and in a local street in Canning. But when we resumed activity on April 6, after the announcement of the quarantine, for three weeks there was not a single call . Then yes, but it was a job: going to look for clients, make stories on Instagram, contact them via whastapp ... and it worked ”.
Holik benefited from the fact that a certain sector of the population, by not spending on travel or restaurants, “ does not know what to do with the pesos and launches into remodeling or spare parts. There are more queries than before, although obviously not all of them materialize. ”
Backstage
Advertising photographers Fernando Romeo and Mosy Olabadía, owners of Telestudio, spoke from the antipodes of the shutters that come down. They are dedicated to what in the sector is called " 360 product photography ", those images cut out on Prolijo white background (from a piece of jewelry to a refrigerator) with which we drool before pressing "buy" on the internet.
Fernando Romeo and Mosy Olabadía, owners of Telestudio, work with a special camera that allows them to show products in 360 degrees, for online sales platforms.
Clarín spoke with Romeo, on behalf of this duo of visionaries who a year and a half ago acquired a special camera for those rotating shots: “We actually have two; we recently bought the second camera. There are not more than three in the country. They allow you to work with many products, automate processes, and then the person sees the image as if they had the product in front of them ”.
"Today advertising photography is for e-commerce, I would say that at least 80%. So we are doing well, 50% better , I would say. We are not oblivious to the ups and downs of the economy, but e-commerce platforms grow every year and companies that did not have these channels are realizing that they now need them. ”
The items that generate the most work for them? Appliances, auto parts, jewelry, optics and textiles, from footwear and clothing to handbags, detailed Romeo. And, beyond his good fortune, he concluded: “I do not think that e-commerce will replace the physical premises on the street. Little by little, with many changes and new ventures, the blinds will be raised again ”.
GS