From retailer to our own brand

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 in Turkey but the collection was picked up by the 2 biggest online retailers in the US. Incredible start ! Bad thing though is that these two (freshpair and undergear) were actually going bankrupt and nobody anymore to buy our new collection apart from a German distributor who was 6 months late in payments.

But the success of this first collection and then of a viral videos that got millions of views showed us that we were on the right path.

We changed production to a factory we knew in Colombia but it took way too long for the next collection to come out and our buzz was already gone. The process was way too slow and it was impossible to launch more than 2 collections a year. Then we started thinking about China thanks to our Chinese intern Ninon. She created the company in Guangzhou, we started hiring a seamstress but managing distance, employees of a different culture from 10 000km away made it impossible to move fast and it totally dried up our cashflow before our workshop could really be up and running. 

We had to rent an office (that allowed a foreign capital company), hire people(6 people work full-time for production), find fabric suppliers, bags, labels, sewing machines.... We had to learn everything about production and build a whole sewing workshop from the ground up in a new country with zero experience and very little money.
For 2 years, we would go and forth to China and we would keep selling other brands. In 2016, we stayed 6 months in a row in China to really have this production unit work smoothly. We were finally able to produce what we needed for our online retail and decided to move permanently to China in 2017. This meant that we had to give up our office in France and transfer all our inventories to Amazon FBA, who would from now on fulfill our orders to our customers.

Unfortunately it took over 6 months for Amazon to finalize our account because of a glitch, meaning we couldn't ship anything new to Amazon. 6 months without any new product to sell, our business was dying and was reaching the point of no return! They eventually solved this issue but had a lot of work to catch up to. Our customers thought our brand and online retail were closing down since we didn't have new products for 6 months compared to twice a week before. It was really not like what they were used to and it took 6-9 months to get most of these customers back.

When we were finally able to produce 2500 units a month and 30 collections a year, we knew we were on the right track.

From this we learnt that hard work doesn't always pay off, there's always the luck factor. You cannot control what your suppliers, providers, customers, competitors, governement will do and no matter how thriving your business is, you can be gone within 3 months.
It also taught us that we were right : we had to create our own brand. If we had done that 2 years before, it would have been a whole other story. We also know that with dildok we'll always respect the vendors and the brands, maybe it sounds cheesy but at the end of the day we're all here in the same ship and helping each other is the best way for everybody to make more money.