“We want to be the biggest UK entertainment brand in the world”, says Rudy Osorio, Commercial Director at Rarewaves. And it’s no idle boast, over the years they’ve already sold to 40 million customers in something like 175 different countries and they’re still growing rapidly.
Their latest goal is to move from being a mainly marketplace retailer to a D2C model, attracting sales to the Rarewaves website and this is what Rudy obsesses about on a daily basis. He tells me that when they first made their website transactional, it took 424 days to reach the milestone of their 10,000th order. Today, it only took 10 days for their last 10,000 orders to be placed. Rudy’s goal for 2024 is that they’ll be measuring in minutes how long it takes to get 10,000 orders and they have plans in place to achieve this.
For many marketplace retailers, the ultimate goal is to launch a webstore business and own the customer, and while Rarewaves are doing this it’s not at the expense of cannibalising marketplace sales. And they’ve plans in place to do this, on top of the 180 suppliers Rarewaves work with, they have a queue of 60 new suppliers waiting to be onboarded to expand the breadth of entertainment products that they sell. With 1.7 million SKUs today, the next goal is to reach the 2m SKU level and grow even faster in 2024.
In the full video interview with Rudy you will find:
- 00:00 Rudy Osorio on Rarewaves D2C channels
- 01:21 Migrating from a marketplace model to D2C webstore model
- 02:22 Handling 1.7 million SKUs (and counting!)
- 03:15 424 days to get 10,000th webstore order, but now it’s 10k orders every 10 days!
- 04:55 Website categorisation, curation and navigation
- 05:51 40 million marketplace customers, but how do you attract webstore customers?
- 08:00 Selling across multiple categories from one webstore
- 08:50 What’s next for the Rarewaves website?
- 11:40 Top target territories for Rarewaves
- 12:55 How to grow website traffic and scale rapidly
