My First Blog

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 imported, mainly from South America, that no one in France knew. We had a 2 digits growth for 5 year and never loaned any money to finance this growth.
6 years ago the market changed drastically with many cheap brands coming from China, and American brands releasing fewer collections a year, so we decided to create our own brand, PetitQ Underwear. The launch exceeded our expectations and our brand was picked up by the biggest US online retailers in the underwear industry(freshpair, undergear). But these giants were actually going bankrupt and couldn't adapt to this new market and we had all these underwear in big quantities that we had nobody big enough to sell to. With hard work and a video that went viral globally, we finally sold our underwear but realized we needed to change our production to have smaller quantities and a wider range. Then came the biggest challenge of my life.

4 years ago we opened our own sewing workshop in China to be able to produce dozens of different designs every month to imitate the fast fashion industry. We started from scratch, found the office, the employees, bought the machines, sourced the fabrics, etc... We now have our own employees in Guangzhou who manufacture our underwear and we now do everything from A to Z : from the design to selling on our own online store, from the photos to the social media.
This year I've decided to launch a new store in a field that my online social influence is more adequate for : the adult industry. I believe that I can do great and even disrupt some part of the market.
I will try to blog on more specific parts of my entrepreneurial journey. In 14 years of entrepreneurship I have learnt quite a bit , been through so many ups and downs, and now feel like it's time to pass this knowledge on. 

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