Wholesale to Omnichannel: How IZIPIZI Built a Global Eyewear Brand

Charles Brun is a French entrepreneur who co-founded the eyewear brand IZIPIZI in Paris in 2010 alongside his longtime friends Xavier Aguera and Quentin Couturier. The three founders saw that the standard reading glasses sold at drugstores lacked style, and they set out to prove that readers could be something people actually wanted to wear. That instinct paid off. Today, IZIPIZI is known for colorful, affordable, design-driven glasses made for everyday life.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:00] Intro
• [01:12] Glasses for every moment in life
• [01:42] An idea born from their moms' ugly readers
• [02:59] From incubator to the real launch in 2012
• [04:05] Landing Colette as the first wholesale yes
• [05:16] Klaviyo
• [07:25] How the first yes opens every other door
• [08:14] Building a partnership between three friends
• [10:10] The Friday wheel that decides who speaks first
• [11:06] Intelligems
• [12:32] When ecommerce entered the picture
• [13:45] Why wholesale alone wasn't enough
• [14:19] Wholesale partner pushback on selling online
• [15:15] COVID pushed online sales to 95%
• [16:30] eFulfillment Service
• [17:45] Expanding from Paris into the US
• [18:28] Why the US is more different than it seems
• [19:25] Buying back the US distributor
• [20:05] Hiring an American team to win the US
• [20:48] What Shoptalk Europe brands ask about the US
• [21:55] Why IZIPIZI launched on Amazon in the US
• [22:26] Amazon as a necessary evil for brands
• [23:19] Making the .com work in the States
• [23:41] Moving from Magento to Shopify
• [24:05] Virtual try-on for the first pair
• [24:50] Unifying customers across every channel
• [25:24] A customer is a customer, wherever they buy
• [26:05] Affordable glasses as an impulse buy
• [26:46] Becoming B Corp certified
• [27:50] Why the IZIPIZI name sticks
• [28:43] Where to find IZIPIZI
• [30:12] Final thoughts

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Fashion and design glasses for adult and children izipizi.com
• Follow Charles Brun linkedin.com/in/cbrun/
• Book a demo today at intelligems.io/
• Get your free demo klaviyo.com/honest
• Lower scale costs today efulfillmentservice.com/honest

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