MILAN, Sept. 25 (Class Editori) - Mirta, the Italian start-up which promotes the Made in Italy artisans, by making their products renowned abroad, enters the Chinese market by landing on RED, the Chinese social-commerce platform which boasts more than 300 million users. The company aims at reaching 2.5 million single monthly visits to the platform in the next 6 months and opening an office in Hong Kong dedicated to the Asian market by 2021.
"In line with the excellent results recorded in the Asian area, we thought times were ripe to enter the Chinese market", Martina Capriotti, co-founder of Mirta, has explained to the Aska Agency. "We have decided to start from RED because 90% of users rely on this innovative platform in order to gather information about new foreign brands."
"The social-commerce format perfectly goes hand in hand with the Mirta’s concept, which is not only an e-commerce platform but a union between a social network and a marketplace, where the community can post its own experiences of shopping abroad, by adding captions and advice with other users", Capriotti has reiterated.
From February to May 2020, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong have been the foreign markets in which sales on the platform have recorded the highest growth. Only in May, sales towards Japan increased by 240% compared to the previous month, followed by South Korea (+108%), Hong Kong (+80%) and Singapore (+20%). These are three-digit rates, but the starting point is that of a start-up.
Launched last Autumn by Martina Capriotti and Ciro Di Lanno, former advisors of Boston Consulting Group, Mirta sells hand-made bags by Italian artisans on its website. They are often small workshops handed down from one generation to another, which usually produce for third-parties, for big fashion brands.
Martina Capriotti has started to get in touch with the fashion industry and all its supply chain some years ago, when she was working at the Boston Consulting Group in Milan, Tokyo, Seoul, by discovering the Asian consumer’s passion for Made in Italy.
"In 2019, I decided to leave the consulting group in order to establish something of my own, focused on my values, in a sector I developed a passion for. With my partner Ciro Di Lanno who is specialised in management at Stanford University, we have focused on the foreign markets we knew best such as the USA and Asia, more specifically Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and South Korea", as the businesswoman has explained to The Good in Town.
"Our buyers wait for the product also for two-three months; however, they tell us 'we like this wait'. The feedback we receive from our customers and on which we are creating Mirta are very important to us and we understood that we are able to convey our message to them by letting them know why that wait is needed: that time has become part of the product value".
"Mirta fits very well with sustainability: it has been created with the mission of reviving the artisans' workshop, the small business, the hand-made and it runs against the mass production which has been taking hold in the last decades. Our idea is to lead these small realitiesto the future, by helping them to take advantage of new channels and new digital vehicles in order to arrive everywhere in the world, but constantly keeping high quality standards and respecting their traditional handcrafted method. And even their times", as Capriotti has continued, "in terms of production, our main sustainability aspect consists in trying to work, as far as possible, by following a model which avoids wastes,because everythingwe produce, is already sold. We suggest to the client an overall experience by involving the product and its waiting too".
The Mirta platform is a window for artisans, by providing them andall their iconic pieces visibility; the customer visits the platform and orders the product and, only at this point, the artisan starts the production of the piece specifically for him.
"In this way, on the one hand the product is unique,and this is something the customer likes very much; on the other, the artisan's work can be optimised. He orders the material needed and produces a product which has already been bought, by avoiding many wastes, currently common in the world of fashion, which produces many stocks resulting also in many unsold products. The customer appreciates the wait because he knows that there is an artisan working only for him".
Currently,Mirta relies on fifty artisans in its network but it has not been so easy to employ them at first. "At the beginning, many artisans were sceptical because our offer involves a change, at least partial, in their processes and ways of working: today, this kind of artisans are working very hard on behalf of third parties, other brands. We have solved the problem by focusing on human relation and therefore getting to know them one by one, entering in their workshops, explaining our project with enthusiasm which was not only to sale their products but also to make their stories known, because they are part of our country’s cultural heritage", as the businesswoman has concluded.
(Source:Class Editori)
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