As Poslovni Dnevnik/Bernard Ivezic writes on the 7th of March, 2020, the success of the Miret startup via the Kickstarter campaign is significant if one knows that in one single day, it reached the level of turnover serious players and companies in that industry enjoy, with one third of its sales coming from exports.
It is a well known fact that startups in Croatia, as well as their respective successes, are mostly related to technological products, therefore it came as somewhat of a surprise when the Croatian Miret startup did things differently. It was on Kickstarter, the globally dominant crowdfunding platform, that this domestic company closed the largest sale of running shoes ever produced.
In one day, the Miret startup sold shoes in the amount of a quarter of a million kuna. In three days, it is expected that they will sell them for more than 50,000 euros, and the campaign on Kickstarter will last for a whole month.
The success of the Miret startup is interesting for many reasons, and the reasons for the level of interest isn’t exclusive solely to startups, but also to much larger companies in Croatia, especially those looking for ways to expand their sales abroad. The first and obvious reason that makes the Miret startup and its campaign interesting is the initial sales volume.
A relatively new brand of Croatian-made trainers, Miret, which lacks the logistics of larger, more experienced players, has managed to reach the daily sales of far larger players in its industry.
Another thing that makes the Miret startup interesting is that in one single day, it immediately raised its share of its foreign sales to 30-40 percent. Namely, after Croatia, the next largest number of supporters, and consequently buyers of these Croatian shoes, come from the USA, Slovenia, Germany and Austria.
Supporters from Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Canada are also represented in larger numbers. There are more reasons still. The Miret startup’s shoes are not low-priced merchandise. Premium trainer brands in Croatia sell for an average price of 400 to 800 kuna, and often more.
Miret’s trainers, which include a Croatian design brand, cost around 570 kuna (85 US dollars), and the Kickstarter campaign just showed that there are people who consider that a very affordable price. Miret produces trainers made from natural materials such as hemp, flax, corn, eucalyptus and wool. In total, they claim that as much as 97 percent of the material in the trainers are natural, making these shoes among the most environmentally friendly in the entire world.
In addition, after three years, the Miret startup’s trainers will have almost completely broken down when used for compost. The owners of the Miret startup are brothers Domagoj and Hrvoje Boljar, for whom this is a continuation of the family footwear business, in which they have had their fair share of ups and downs.
Their entry onto the market, and thus the Kickstarter campaign, is in line with the trend of a growing demand for organic products.
The trainer industry is very ”dirty” when it comes to the environment. The main problem is plastic, both due to the intensive use of petroleum products in the production of the shoes, and due to the fact that they tend to be non-degradable.
As many as sixteen million tonnes of non-degradable footwear end up in the sea annually, and despite the warnings, the problem of waste accumulation in the seas hasn’t really been reduced. In 1950, it was estimated that 2 million tonnes of plastic had been dumped in the sea, and today an average of 400 million tonnes per year continues to be thrown into the sea.
Up until now, the level of success we’ve seen from the Miret startup has generally been experienced solely by technological products on Kickstarter, making what the Miret startup has managed to acheive something special indeed.
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