2024-04-01 16:00:25
Let chance decide what your next jersey will be? This is what the mystery boxes from the French company Un Bon Maillot offer. Louis Le Nevé, co-founder, discusses the concept and discusses the future development of the start-up.
For those who are not familiar with Un Bon Maillot, can you explain the concept?
The concept is very simple, we are a company that specializes in mystery boxes. These are available in football, rugby and more recently basketball mystery boxes. In other words, our customers come to our website, choose their usual size and of course their sport. We give them the possibility of being able to offer all the teams that they would not already have or that they do not have at all. Chance takes care of sending them a randomly chosen jersey directly to their home or to a relay point.
How did you come up with the idea of mystery boxes?
The idea of the mystery box is a concept that we took up, which already existed in many other areas such as fashion or cosmetics. We have readapted it to an area that we master more than another sector, that of sport.
You started with mystery boxes of football jerseys, which is what made you known on social networks. Now you also offer rugby and basketball jerseys, but how do you get all these jerseys?
At the beginning, it wasn’t easy, especially the first weeks. I think it was quite complicated, especially to be taken seriously. Then, little by little, by showing our seriousness, today we have the chance to be in direct contact with all the sports equipment manufacturers. We therefore go directly to the source, without the intermediary of clubs and without the intermediary of resellers or wholesalers. We buy from brands directly.
You offer jerseys for three sports. Are you considering expanding mystery boxes to other sports?
It’s a good question. We ask ourselves this question quite often. It’s true that the idea of handball is appearing more and more. So why not, knowing that we are really in demand in this direction. This is why we are seriously considering it. We are already lucky to have the suppliers, since they are almost the same as in football, so it could go very quickly. The real question is whether there is a real market, a real demand.
Given the affordable prices of mystery boxes, how do you manage to be profitable?
That’s a very good question ! (laughter) The price was super important for the concept. Indeed, customers who order from us take a risk. In order for this risk to be moderate, the prices had to be attractive. The idea was not to sell our jerseys at the same price as in stores, because people would not take the risk of buying a jersey at random. Obviously, this is to the detriment of our margin. Our margin is much lower than other sellers. However, we are banking on volume. Little by little, by being able to sell more and more, we can buy more and more. Thus, we are able to lower our purchase prices. Every year, we renegotiate them and we manage to reduce them by a few euros here and there.
Un Bon Maillot is a partner of FC Metz, SAS Football Épinal, and also of François Cros. Do these partnerships allow you to gain credibility?
We have a new addition, SLUC Nancy, a Pro A club. More recently, it was a few weeks ago, we became partners of the Spanish football club Huesca. We do these partnerships for pleasure, we are football fanatics and it’s pure fun to be able to sponsor clubs like that. But it is above all for notoriety, image and credibility given that we position ourselves much cheaper than market prices. Naturally, there are customers who question the authenticity of the jerseys, which is legitimate. This is why it is important for us to associate our image with renowned clubs or athletes to reassure our customers about the quality of our products.
With this new partnership with the Huesca club, is an international dimension emerging at Un Bon Maillot?
Exactly, that was the plan for 2024. This is what we called “our conquest of Europe”. We aimed to be able to start opening new markets at the beginning of January, we had already been able to sell in 40 countries on five different continents. These sales mainly came from French people who are installed on the right or on the left. The significant difference is that now we are attacking markets in the literal sense, we started in Spain and Germany. We adapt our ads and our sites in the language in question in order to correspond to the world of the country in question.
Recently, you managed to obtain an investment from Kelly Massol and Tony Parker, thanks to the show “Who Wants to Be My Partner”. What will this bring you, beyond financing?
To be frank and honest, we didn’t go there for the money, that wasn’t our primary source of motivation. We went there for a reason, which is linked to our desire to conquer Europe. To achieve this, we are aware that we must improve our skills and expand our network. This is the advantage of being able to have renowned investors with large address books, this will save us time. This will help us in this conquest because if we can go there better and more armed, it will logically be accessible more quickly.
What are the next objectives for the development of Un Bon Maillot?
There are many, there are even more now that we have the opportunity to be publicized, it has done us a lot of good. The first is to continue our conquest of Europe of course. Next, we plan to tackle B2B. It’s a very big market, we’ve seen a lot of companies, associations and amateur clubs who have made purchases in large quantities, so we’re going to deploy these models. Finally, the last objective, our favorite with Timothé Odin (the other co-founder), is to develop the vintage market. It’s a market that has a lot of potential and is close to our hearts as football fans. We hope to be able to deploy it in the coming weeks.
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