Elegance is an attitude and in Muroexe they are very clear about it. The saying that to show off you have to suffer is very old fashioned, no more sore feet after a busy day, now it is painless to be comfortable and elegant.
Today we introduce you to David Moran, Head of Ecommerce and Digital of Muroexe, the company that has brought the future to our feet and has given a touch of style to the suit with sneakers.
#dothefuture and discover how David can take on Goliath and how there is life beyond leather shoes.
A book
Hacking your buyers' brains by José Cortizo Perez
This is the last book I have read and I liked it very much, it seems to me a bible in which a lot of interesting information has been compiled and that everyone who is dedicated to eCommerce should read.
A place
Singapore
It brings together everything a city needs to have both culturally and leisurely, but also for how the city is distributed. A super futuristic city very well developed and very well planned, it is enviable.
A famous phrase that describes you or that you like especially
Make a customer, not a sale
I even have it in my signature. I think it is really the mantra that everyone at eCommerce should have in their heads if we want to make a project and a eCommerce profitable in the medium and long term.
Turnover 2020 5 million €, we have not met the objectives we had but not so bad for everything that came over us and for the setback of the physical stores.
Countries in which you can enjoy a Muroexe
Right now we are shipping to 33 countries, in our history we have shipped to more than 50 countries.
Where does the name Muroexe come from and how was the idea born?
At the beginning we thought of muro.exe, we were looking for a short name of 4 letters that did not mean anything and that would give us the possibility to internationalize, to go outside with the same name because from the first moment there was a global vision of the project.
The first campaigns were groundbreaking, they were focused on getting rid of the Muroexe virus, which now, logically, sounds terrible.
Fortunately that was many years ago and now we have to erase all traces of those first campaigns, they were very futuristic videos with people in suits with gas masks and it was not very clear what we were going to bring to the market... now with what is happening now, that is more than forbidden.
Have you always worn a suit and sneakers or do you have a shoe past?
I have migrated from shoes to sneakers after Muroexe, this is the good thing that I think the brand is showing, that you can be just as elegant with sneakers as with leather shoes and that is what people appreciate the most.
Being able to dress well without compromising comfort was the main niche that was tested in the market, when there was no brand of sneakers that was really making very comfortable sneakers but that would allow you to wear a suit or even go to a wedding with them without being out of place. That's why we continue to sell more to men than to women, as they are the target group that is more suited to dress like this, to go to the office in a more casual way.
Our main target is still entrepreneurs, banks, companies. People who want to go a little casual and who work in an office.
What is elegance for you, and is it incompatible with comfort?
Elegance is not incompatible with comfort and that is what we try to demonstrate with our sneakers and our very minimalist designs that combine well, dress you well and that can accompany you from first thing in the office until you go after work, which is a bit what most of our customers do.
How would you define Muroexe in one sentence?
David vs. Goliath
Among the giants of the fashion and footwear industry we are trying to carve out a niche for ourselves and become a reference brand within our niche.
And in one word?
Innovation
Innovation in materials, design, marketing and communication is what has allowed us to carve out a small niche in the consumer's mind, innovating a lot in how we communicate to fight against the large budgets of other companies.
What was the click that made you realize that something had to change and made you go from selling a few pairs to selling out?
When the brand was founded we didn't know how the consumer would react, we have been pivoting. First we made a lot of unisex footwear, all the models were unisex and over time we have realized that women are looking for other types of things and we have developed specific collections for each sex.
Then, we started to test other types of products such as accessories and textiles. On the accessory side we will continue, but on the textile side we are not so sure.
Many people spent 2020 in slippers, how did you experience it?
The Slipper slippers sold out quickly, but since the restrictions also affected the manufacturers, we were unable to replenish the stock and continue to offer comfort in our customers' home offices.
How have you lived the experience of creating a startup and seeing it grow?
I am not a founder but I am almost since the beginning of the project and I would not change for anything to have had the experience of growing a Startup.
That fast evolution with which projects are developed or the agile changes you can make in a Startup... I was also in the corporate sector and in that world you can't see this agility.
What do your customers value most about your products?
Find a shoe with a price-quality ratio and comfort that is hardly matched today by the big brands.
What kind of digital solutions help you most to sell in your day-to-day business?
We use many tools that allow us to optimize our digital marketing campaigns. More advanced reporting and above all a platform like Shopify eCommerce that allows us to have little equipment and be very agile in the changes.
Things like that are the ones that help us the most and that we use the most in our day to day. Advanced email marketing platforms that allow us to make segmentations and automations that, when you start to have a relevant database of users, is quite important.
What do you think of the eCommerce revolution after the confinements?
Right now people are asking for more products like the Slippers I mentioned before because consumption in footwear has logically fallen, if you can't go out it makes little sense for people to buy shoes and slippers are the most logical thing to buy if people are teleworking. Consumption priorities have changed.
We are working to bring out more products that are more for everyday use than for going to the office, although, of course, we all have the expectation that this will change in a few months and that many of these things will really start to be reversed.
How was the international leap?
Hard, costly and with many headaches.
As always, when you go to other countries it is much more expensive to attract customers, it is much more expensive to generate sales than in Spain, so in that sense we are doing everything we can to make a dent in other markets, which in our order of sales would be Germany, France and then the US, and then it is distributed among the countries of the rest of Europe.
Why #dothefuture?
We believe that this is what defines us the most because from the very first moment we thought that, at the end of the day, we are building the future of footwear and we always play a lot around that.
Innovation is at the core of our brand, in fact, we send out newsletters that have nothing to do with our products but show ideas that we like, gadgets that have been released, discoveries about space and the future that fit with our brand and our ideals.
In this sense #dothefuture is a hashtag and a phrase, a claim that is constant from the first moment in all our communication and campaigns because it gathers all the values that identify us and what we play with in our communication.
Future plans?
The first is to subsist with everything we have on top like any fashion brand. Before the pandemic we were very focused on opening physical stores, we were already on our sixth physical store and we had to reverse our steps and go back to digital.
The most immediate future is to go back to the origins and refocus on digital and eCommerce and look at the internationalization part leaving a little more aside the retail and physical stores part.
At the product level, the idea is to try to bring out more products for the home, for teleworking, more accessories and to continue innovating. We have many cool things in progress and we are making prototypes of them.
Would you like to get to know him better? You can find him at Digital 1to1 SpringSo don't hesitate any longer and come and say hello to him and other professionals from eCommerce Español. Contact us and reserve your place.
