When the financial crisis struck Greece, Minoglou SA a 3-gen shoe production company found itself in a very difficult financial situation, as the majority of greek businesses.

So, new ideas, new concepts and a lot of technology came to the foreground, as the tools to face the recession. And MyShoe.gr, an online shoe retailer was build, when people hardly knew about eCommerce in Greece.

The Challenge

MyShoe.gr ages back to 2010. Which might sound a few years, in real life, but when it comes to eCommerce and Greece, that sounds almost ancient. And during that time, the challenges were quite a few:

• Luck of trust in Online Sales:Today, more than 1 in 5 people buy only, others are frequent ROPO (Research online, purchase offline) buyers, but back in 2010, very few people trusted the internet for their purchases, especially when it the conversation was about fashion.

• Experience of managing an online pure player:Shifting a company from manufacturing shoes, to an online property that intented to become a multi-brand shoe retailer is not an easy decision, especially if you don't know many things on how to run a tech startup (by the definition of those ages).

• Reshaping the whole logistics process:From operating a production plant that manufactured shoes to changing everything on the property and converting it to a logistics hub for picking and packing orders, is not an easy thing, not even writing it.  Imagine on developing it.

The Solution

The greatest difficulty on all challenges, was not the cost nor the willingness of people to commit to the effort.

It was the lack of technology and necessary software to build something stable that would allow it to grow as problem-free, as possible.

So, we committed from the beginning to write our own software for everything. And to make our lives even more difficult, we decided to experiment on a new technology, to provide us flexibility, scalability, security and business continuity. It was the cloud.

And so we did. We developed a fully custom front-end for the website, a fully custom back-end for the website, an online ERP and reporting system, etc. We even developed a super past one-page phone ordering mechanism from scratch, as those days people felt easier to order that way, instead of placing an online order.

The results

The first day MyShoe.gr was launched, back in 2010, it received 2 online orders, from two brave people. Since then, MyShoe started climbing rapidly with a double-digitl MoM increase, reaching:

• From 0€ to 10mil in sales, within 4 years

• Becoming the market leader with more than 50% market share (within 4 years)

• More than half a million satisfied customers

• Awarded, amongst the 20 other industry distinctions, as the Best Greek eShop, travelled to Barcelona to represent Greece in the European eCommerce Awards, and managed to enter the shortlist of the top-5 european webstores