Nicolas Rangeard Entrepreneur

I started as a retailer selling sexy men's underwear,with an initial capital of only $500 and reached a yearly revenue of $500k. The store carried up to 60 brands from around the world. The key to success was having new stuff all the time.  Unfortunately our top 10 brands, making up roughly 70% of our revenue increased significantly the time in between 2 new collections and/or stopped products that were our best-sellers (a product can be a best-seller in the US and not in France and vice-versa) and we stopped growing. After 5 years as retailers, my business partner was one of the best buyer in this industry, having worked with 100+ brands, many of whom had never been sold outside their homecountry. He knew perfectly the products we were missing. PetitQ was a name and had customers, why not start our own brand ? That way we would have control over the timing of the arrivals. Well, starting our brand with little money was a true challenge. We started with only 6 products made i...

I have to say I am still not very happy about that but hey, all markets evolve and you have to roll with the punches. In 2011, our online business was thriving, we had so many new brands, the website was known for having all the new sexy underwear, pushing bounderies by offering brands that were really specific, we introduced lace for men for instance.   But then, Chinese manufacturers started selling directly at a third of the price we were selling to or even less. They started selling through on amazon but also on aliexpress and later on wish. Copies have always been a big part of fashion. Designers always get influenced by other's designs. What was new, was that the Chinese factories were able to sell copies using the original brand images and even brand's name with the blessing of Amazon. Even though the quality was not the same, we got many customers who discovered copies of the brands we carried at dirt cheap price and they were not happy, wondering why our pr...

It didn't earn me a spot on Forbes's 30 under 30 entrepreneurs list,  but I learnt a lot from my first business back in 2005. My friend was a huge fan of Mariah Carey, he used to buy all of her CDs but also all the special editions she had released for Europe, Japan... At that time Amazon was not that big and buying from abroad was pretty complicated. I also discovered the fan universe which is a real industry. It gave me the idea of starting a niche business. Forums, MySpace were getting big and I had the feeling that people would like to enjoy a more dedicated shopping experience based on their community. The idea was to have an online store for one artist; CDs + mp3, linked to a forum. It started pretty well. A new album had just been released and there were many new limited editions from all around the world I could sell. I ran into 2 obstacles. First one was the lack of new products in between 2 albums. I looked for other singers to duplicate the idea and create a m...

Well, this isn't exactly my first blog post, I've been blogging for the past 14 years but this is the first time I really write about my experience as an entrepreneur.  So let's introduce myself briefly. My name is Nicolas Rangeard, I am French, and I now live in Guangzhou, South China. I received a Master of Economics & Management at  Université Paris Dauphine and a master's degree in Communication Management and New Technologies at Université Aix-Marseilles In 2006, I created my company while attending my master's degree. The initial capital was of only  500usd, all invested in inventories of men's underwear. The initial capital was too low to be able to work with the big names of France's underwear market, so the decision was made to mainly work with foreign brands which were not already available in France. I created my online store, www.petit-q.com based on OsCommerce and after a few years we were selling 50+ different brands, all importe...