moKee is an online nursery brand and retailer. We sell and deliver our design-led baby furniture and equipment directly to consumers all over Europe at a fraction of the price it would cost through traditional retail channels.Since its launch in April 2013, moKee has sold over 4000 of its flagship product, the moKee mini cot, and is well on track to deliver another 6000 units over the next 12 months.
moKee is an online nursery brand and retailer. We sell and deliver our design-led baby furniture and equipment directly to consumers all over Europe at a fraction of the price it would cost through traditional retail channels.
Since its launch in April 2013, moKee has sold over 4000 of its flagship product, the moKee mini cot, and is well on track to deliver another 6000 units over the next 12 months.
CONSUMER SHIFT
With the rise of design-inspiration websites, such as Pinterest, consumers are now increasingly searching for unique nursery designs that are consistent with their home interior design.
However, our research shows that mainstream nursery chains have been recycling the same traditional designs for the past decade.
On the other end of the spectrum, design-led brands are expensive and usually out of reach for most customers.
This is partly due to the intermediaries involved in the supply chain, the daunting cost of bricks-and-mortar high-street stores but also the old-fashioned concept that to be an aspirational luxury brand, your products should be expensive and reserved for an “elite” who can afford to pocket out £500+ for a baby cot, for instance. This means that the costs of production are often multiplied by six to eight times before they reach the end consumer.
And this is what we are trying to change. We are on a mission to offer affordable nursery designs to the largest number of people. Our research shows that people nowadays are looking for brands that are approachable, transparent and fair. The rapid growth and success of vertically integrated brands in other industries, such as Bonobos, Everlane, Made.com and Warby Parker, are proof of this shift in consumer demand.
We believe we can make it happen, unlike the other “more established” nursery brands on the market. Here are three reasons why:
1. ONLINE ONLY DIRECT TO CONSUMERS
We position ourselves as a pure online multichannel player, meaning we sell exclusively to consumers through our website and online marketplaces. This means we have reduced the number of intermediaries in the supply chain and we can pass the savings onto our consumers. We give them a fair deal whilst still maintaining healthy margins.
The other advantage of the online-only model is that we are able to create a unique experience that is not possible in a physical retail environment, through mass customisation of our product, but also by giving customers an opportunity to influence the design and functionality of our products. This is something we will be experimenting with and developing further.
2. EUROPEAN SCALE AND CENTRALISED LOGISTICS
Our main operation is located in Poland, near our factories. From there we are able to ship all over Europe competitively by avoiding unnecessary transport costs.
3. LOCAL SOURCING & PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
We aim to source most of our products from European manufacturers, which usually have lower MOQs and also much faster transportation turnaround times than goods imported from Asia. By doing so, we are also able to reduce drastically our product development cycles, which helps us to launch, test demand and iterate faster. Having compared both locations (Europe vs Asia), we have often noticed that the delivered prices were not far apart. Also with the dollar getting stronger and rising labour costs, Asian manufacturers are slowly losing their edge for exports.
There will be instances and specific categories of products where we will have to source beyond Europe but we will always check in Europe first.
MARKETING OUR PRODUCTS
Currently a large proportion of sales from the site have been the result of blogs and word of mouth. We have also started to test Facebook ads and CRM activities; these are still at a very early stage but they look promising.
Moving forward and with the help of our fundraising, we will be able to test new channels and improve existing ones. We are aiming and budgeting for 10–15% CPA across all channels and we intend to focus initially on the following marketing mix:
PR: Our product style combined with our attractive prices, make us a favourite with bloggers and the press in general. As we will have an aggressive product development agenda, we are expecting PR to bring us a sizable amount of targeted traffic in the long term. We will also be launching an affiliate programme later this year to give further incentives for online publishers to talk about us.
WOM / REFERALS: Interestingly, increasing numbers of customers are recommended by friends and we are now looking at solutions to incentivise happy customers to spread the love around them and become brand advocates for moKee.
SEO: Having few products on sale might have disadvantages compared to multi-brand retailers but we can also spend more time improving and increasing information about our products and other content on our site. So we will be focussing on creating relevant content that search engines love. Also we are planning to launch our site in more languages (currently it is in English, Polish and French): Spanish, German and Italian are in the pipeline.
Facebook ads: We believe that Facebook offers very powerful targeting features and our very visual products are well suited for this non-intrusive format. This is currently being tested.
Partnerships and collaborations: Partnership and design collaborations with non-competing brands with similar target customers and with well-known designers are a great way to put our brand in front of potential customers, build credibility and also grow our database.
CRM: Email is still the most intimate way to communicate with people. And used well, it is a powerful channel to engage with potential customers, upsell and launch new products.
DESIGN & PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT APPROACH
We currently focus on pre-birth essential products. But eventually we will be growing with our customers’ children and developing products for up to 5–6-year-old kids.
Our aim is not to flood each category with a large number of references but to create a few optimal products in each category and to gain breadth of inventory rapidly. Our designs must match four criteria:
1. Price
We analyse each category and define an ideal pricing range and keep that in mind throughout the whole development process.
2. Style and uniqueness
We focus on minimalistic style often inspired by Scandinavian designs, as their simplicity makes them cheaper to produce whilst still being visually appealing.
3. Functionality
Products for babies should be functional but should also make parents’ lives easier. This is where consumer feedback really turns into action. We do not want to be an arrogant brand telling people what they need. By working with and listening to our consumers, we believe we can eliminate unnecessary features to focus on what they really need from our products.
4. Safety
Before anything else, a product for babies must be safe, so we work with safety-testing houses (Bureau Veritas, Fira, etc.) as well as our manufacturers to ensure our products comply with UK and European safety requirements. This is done throughout the process to ensure our product development cycles are not slowed down by compliance issues.
MOKEE TIMELINE AND SOME NUMBERS
USE OF FUNDS
We are looking for a £250K investment from Crowdcube, which will be used mainly for two things:
MARKETING: To experiment with marketing channels, and to optimise and scale them. Also to enter new markets progressively.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT & PRODUCTION: To achieve our product launch targets, we need to grow our product development team. We need funds for prototyping and testing and we need a cash flow for initial orders.
THE BATTLE IS HAPPENING ONLINE
The nursery market might seem at first sight like one of those established markets with dominant players where little innovation and growth can occur. However, the real battle and growth opportunities are online. Our research shows a growing percentage of the population are embracing ecommerce for major purchases. However, penetration rates are still relatively low and established bricks-and-mortar brands are struggling to transform their businesses and adapt to online demand. We believe we are in a prime position to grab market share and establish ourselves as a dominant online player.
moKee’s operational office is located in Krakow near our logistics centre and factories.
We are currently renting desks in a creative and product development focus co-working space, which is great as we have access to a number of tools we need during prototyping.
THE TEAM:
Samuel Serra – Founder & CEO
Samuel Serra is an online entrepreneur with a strong background in ecommerce. Most notably he co-founded Boudoir Privé, which was subsequently sold to Jolie Box and shortly afterwards to worldwide leader Birchbox. He then consulted for edgy knitting brand Wool and the Gang after their series A and he was part of the team that relocated its operations and logistics to the UK. Samuel now spends his time between London, where he lives with his wife and two children, and with his team in Krakow.
NINJA SKILLS: START-UPS, OPERATIONS, LOGISTICS, ECOMMERCE
Kinga Chmielarz – Head of Design
Kinga is an award-winning product designer with over five years of experience designing for various large furniture brands in Poland.
NINJA SKILLS: PRODUCT & INDUSTRIAL DESIGN, GRAPHIC DESIGN, BRANDING
Maciek Serafin – Marketing Manager
Maciek is our marketing manager. He helped one of the first and largest voucher code sites in Poland, Kody Rabatowe, to grow to become the major player it is today.
NINJA SKILLS: ONLINE MARKETING, CUSTOMER ACQUISITION, PR, SOCIAL
Slawomir Dlugosz – CTO
Slawomir is our new CTO. He has been working on Magento projects since the beginning and has strong PHP and mobile development skills. He currently works for us part time but will be joining the team as a full-time CTO when we raise the funding.
NINJA SKILLS: MAGENTO, SYMFONIA, MOBILE, ERP
We also have three great junior employees, Milena, Barbara, Lukasz, supporting our design and marketing team.
SALES:
USE OF FUNDS:
EXPENSES AND PROFITABILITY:
EXISTING DEBT OR EQUITY INVESTMENTS:
CASH:
Over the next five years, we intend to develop moKee to reach a turnover circa £12M per annum and £3.2M in EBITDA. Trade sales could make sense and, based on ecommerce average sales valuation multiples of two to three times revenue, we could expect a valuation in the range of £24-36M, giving back £3.6 – 4.5M to CrowdCube investors or a 12-20x return on their investment.
Thank you so much for investing, we will keep you posted regularly about our progress
5% off all our products for the next 3 years.
Get 10% off our products for the next 3 years + £50 voucher per year
As well as getting A Shares, we will fly you to our team in Krakow for 2 days, where you will meet our team and spend some time discussing product development & strategy as well as enjoying some of the local specialities.