Colizey was a French start up marketplace, launched in April 2019, with the aim to reinvent online sporting goods sales. They wanted to offer a simple, intuitive and personalised shopping experiences on products that perform well covering everything from clothing, shoes, equipment, accessories, high tech through to nutrition and supplements.
Sadly news has broken that after six years, Colizey closed its doors on Tuesday, the 4th of February as a solution to finding long-term sustainability of the company couldn’t be found.
The market has changed says Maxime Scialom, adding that sports brands, with their selective distribution contracts, have forbidden their distributors to sell on marketplaces. This has made it almost impossible to integrate new merchants and it is very difficult to keep their existing partners. Maxime concluded that without growth, there is no financing!
After raising €12 million, and €50 million paid to their partners (they boasted 250 merchants from 10 European countries), Colizey had served 350,000 customers since they opened in France and Italy. That’s going to leave a big hole for these merchants who will now be looking for alternative venues to fill the gap.
What made Colizey different to many of the newer marketplaces is that they weren’t themselves a retailers. This made them an attractive platform to trade on, but the double edged sword is that they also didn’t have any profits from retail sales to cover their base costs. Has the world moved on from where a pure marketplace can build and profitably operate in a single category? It would a sad if that is the case.
