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~ Ranpak ~

“MY FATHER IS ONE OF

THE GREATEST SUCCESS

FACTORS WITHIN OUR

FAMILY BUSINESS”

Text: Sanne Leenders // Photos: Charalambos Triantafillidis, luxluminis.com // Graph: kreta-oel.de / trisomema.de

Kreta Öl is an authentic family business and started selling their Cretan and Greek oil
products in 2000. The entire family behind Kreta Öl originates from Crete. However, Markos
Kourtalios, the Founder of Kreta Öl, was born in Germany. We met with Markos to tell us
more about Kreta Öl’s unique success story. Originally, the company started selling their
products business-to-business. Later on, they decided to sell their products directly to
the consumers as well by using their own online platform and online marketplaces, which
ultimately led to expanding their product line. Markos explains that selling on eBay in 2003

was just a test to see if it would increase their sales. Surprisingly, the sales on eBay grew quickly
from day one. For Markos, this was the starting point to explore the internet more. Everything
starts with the product and their success story is about the strength of a family business and the
ability to ensure the quality of all of their products.

reta Öl has been working with local producers in be a great success since our products are too unique to sell
Crete from the very beginning. My parents were to masses. We do still sell our products in the delicatessen
Kalready acquainted with the local producers because stores. Currently, we have a very large loyal customer base,
they still lived in Crete. Thus, my family could ensure the approximately 50% of our customers are loyal to us. They
great quality of our oil products. At the moment, my father started off with buying our oil products and eventually we
is still in direct contact with the local farmers which creates started to expand our product line to offer more to our
a unique advantage in light of the fact that my father is very loyal customers. Our customer base keeps growing every
familiar with the market and knows that good quality is at a year, but growth is not our objective. We prefer to remain
good price. This has been one of the greatest factors of our a smaller business with a stable growth and the ability to
ongoing success. keep adding new products. During the last few years, we
have experienced quite a bit of growth because of the sales
Online marketplaces were the key to more success on eBay in Germany and our own online platform, but we
In 2003, we started selling our oil products through the have also started selling our products on Amazon to sell our
online marketplace, eBay. At first, we did not expect that products internationally. We do use Amazon’s vendor model
selling their products on eBay would be a great success. but we also ship our products directly to our customers who
However, since we were the first company that sold olive purchase products via Amazon.
oil on eBay in Germany it turned out that it was a greater
success than expected. Afterwards, we decided to advertise Even though eBay was a great starting point for our success,
more on the online platform. our current sales on Amazon are higher. 35% of our total
turnover is generated by Amazon, 5% is generated by eBay
In addition to eBay, we also started to sell our products to and the remainder 60% is generated by our own online
delicatessen stores. Unfortunately, this did not turn out to platform. Most of the sales are generated by B2C customers.

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