SOLTAKO is building the leading D2C brand for kitchen essentials made of premium wood. Their long-term goal is to become the first and leading brand for Mediterranean home and living products. Learn about their growth potential and check out their live round on Leapfunder.

1. Hi Tobias. Thank you for agreeing to do the interview. Tell us about SOLTAKO, the idea that got it all started, and the amazing team behind it.

My Co-Founder and friend Brahim approached me in 2018 with the idea of building an international brand for handcrafted products in the home & living category made in Tunisia. As he was born and grew up in Tunisia, he was very well aware of the skilled manufacturing facilities and workshops crafting beautiful products in his home country. However, they lacked marketing and selling the items with the appropriate value proposition to the big European and US markets. This is where we saw our opportunity!

I loved the idea from the start, and we both envisioned a Mediterranean brand. We started our journey testing the first products on Amazon until we had achieved enough results to fully engage in the project from 2020/2021 and start our own webshop.

As Brahim’s grandfather used to have his own small olive wood workshop, it was obvious for us to focus our idea on premium kitchen essentials made of olive wood and to grow the brand from that category.

2. What problems are you trying to solve? What are the benefits of SOLTAKO?

Depending on your home country, certain strong brands come to your mind when you want to buy products for your home. We realized that no brand was focussing on premium wooden kitchen essentials yet. There was also no pure, internationally established online player offering a great value proposition to consumers. 

SOLTAKO is filling the demand in the market, becoming the first D2C brand for kitchen essentials made of premium wood. We offer a vast portfolio and speak the language of customers who prefer to buy online.

3. You have a live round on Leapfunder. What makes it the right tool for your startup, and what do you expect from the round?

Leapfunder connects startups with a network of experienced business angels, investors, and venture capital funds. This makes it easier for us to access funding. Also, Leapfunder offers standardized legal documents for investments. This simplifies the investment process and saves time and costs. Lastly, Leapfunder has been around for a while, which makes it a trustworthy vehicle for us and our potential investors.

4. How much growth potential do you see for SOLTAKO?

Our products are used on a daily basis in basically every household: cutting, chopping, stirring, flipping, mortaring, presenting, and serving – we all must cook and eat. Thus, every household is a potential customer of our brand for one or more products, creating an opportunity to be a +€100M/year revenue brand.

5. What are your plans for the upcoming months? Tell us about your go-to-market strategy and the plan to acquire customers.

We are currently focussing on securing as much stock as possible to fill our warehouses for the busiest and most profitable season of the year: Christmas. We make up to 40% of our revenue annually in November and December. As we are always sold out on our best-selling items before even hitting the final 1-2 weeks before Christmas, it has become our mission to increase our inventory as much as possible each Q4 season.

We are also very excited to have our webshop at a new level, including many winning ads and a more sophisticated ad structure on Google and Meta. Therefore, we expect the webshop to outperform Amazon Europe for the first time. Since we have already seen higher daily revenues than on Amazon Europe in the last days of October, we are very confident of achieving this target.

For 2024, we will keep pushing growth, especially on the webshop, by iterating and improving ads and adding a strong content creation program starting in Q2. We are currently putting together the respective content team. It will be an exciting next year, and we are expecting to see growth rates of around 100%.

Thank you for sharing your story with us, Tobias. We wish SOLTAKO the best of luck.

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