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The United States and Germany were the two countries chosen by the Impetus group as strategic markets for their international expansion, after consolidating their position in France and Spain.
Online sales were the tool chosen by Impetus to penetrate the North American market. The company has a small business structure in Miami that supports its presence in important electronic platforms such as Underwear Expert and Amazon, where the Portuguese group is already in the Prime service.
ProtechDry – an innovative piece of underwear which absorbs small amounts of urine, developed in partnership with the University of Minho and made in 95% washable and sustainable cotton, is the product in which the Impetus group bets to establish itself in the demanding but juicy North American market.
For the attack on Germany – and to the neighboring Austria and Switzerland – the company hired a German commercial director, with 30 years of experience in the sector, especially regarding markets of Germanic language.
“The strategy is to have corners in all of the big department stores chains,” explains Fernando Figueiredo, the Impetus administrator who has been leading the group’s Online Business Sales department for ten years.
Focusing efforts on a small number of handpicked markets is main goal of the Esposende group’s international expansion strategy. The company ended last year with a 44 million euros turnover.
“It’s better to be strong in a few markets than to be weak in all of them. It takes scale and size. I can’t invest one million euros in marketing in a market where I sell only half a million”, says Alberto Figueiredo, the group’s president.
In the Spanish market, where Impetus has corners on a network of around 100 El Corte Inglés warehouses (for whom it manufactures, under the private label regime, underwear brands such as Emidio Tucci), the company debuted a marketing campaign budgeted at one million euros, which had the goalkeeper Iker Casillas as leading man.
“This campaign has increased exponentially our reputation in the Spanish market,” says Fernando Figueiredo, adding that Spain, France (where they mark their presence at Galleries Lafayette) and Portugal are currently Impetus’s three main markets.