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~ Salesupply ~

Imagine you are in the middle of a transition after taking over management of an
international fashion brand, and all of a sudden, COVID-19 comes creeping around the
corner. This was the case for the new team at footwear brand PAEZ. Francisco Lacerda, at the
time Operations Manager at PAEZ, tells us about the ‘perfect storm’ and
how the company navigated its way through the COVID-19 chaos.

AEZ was born in Argentina, transforming the cancel their orders. They did not
classic gaucho alpargata—better known as want us to send the products
Pespadrilles—into a fashion icon, an idea that because they could not pick them
crosses borders and spreads the PAEZ lifestyle worldwide, up from the warehouse (due to
turning the dream of a group of friends into a community lockdown), nor would they pay
of dreamers that keeps growing. for them. From that point on,
everything was on hold, and the
A year of maintenance distributors were very uncertain if
“Before the COVID-19 outbreak, we wanted to maintain they could reopen their business.
a strong offline presence in our main markets - Portugal, That week was all doom and gloom.”
Spain, France, Italy and Poland. We were preparing for
a normal summer while managing the further transition Back to the drawing board
of the company. We were providing support for our B2B “We decided to wait and see for a while since there
customers, maintaining a strong presence in our key ongoing was no need to try and pump out our products yet. We
legacy markets, and preparing a communications campaign created a quick online campaign to communicate and
to celebrate the coming of emphasise that PAEZ is
PAEZ to Portugal. We had “WE HAD super comfortable to wear
everything prepared for the around the house - which
summer; we were ready to is true. In addition, we were
go,” says Francisco. EVERYTHING trying to understand what
we could do to overcome
“March 1st was the starting some of the burden of
shot of the marathon. We PREPARED FOR having most of our products
were ready to ship out our stuck in the warehouse.
what we expected to be a SUMMER; WE WERE We managed to create a
products to all of our clients,
few new partnerships with
and we were prepared for
very good summer for our marketplaces, which helped,
and we started an aggressive
offline channels. Meanwhile, READY TO GO.” discount campaign to sell as
we were revamping and many pairs of PAEZ before
firing up all the social and the summer,” Francisco
digital platforms. Next in explains.
line was the logistics. In
2020, our logistics hub was still located in Barcelona, and the “The world returned to being somewhat normal during
plan was to move it to Portugal after summer. Apart from us the summer, and we were able to remove our discounts.
being there, Portugal is also our strongest market, with 60% However, this was short-lived as COVID-19 hit once again
of our sales being there. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense for and people went back into quarantine, and we had to ramp
the logistics hub to be based in Portugal,” he adds. up our discounts again.”

Ready to rumble COVID-19 taskforce
“We were excited and ready for what we called ‘a summer of “We created an ongoing COVID-19 taskforce to ensure
maintenance,’ not necessarily experiencing crazy growth but customer satisfaction. The taskforce would meet virtually
getting a hold of handling everything with a small and new twice a week to discover and handle ongoing issues and
team and establishing a good relationship with our ongoing prevent them. The customer service team of our partner
customers and becoming closer to them. However, this did Salesupply played a big role during this process,” says
not proceed in the way we wanted or imagined.” Francisco.
On that faithful day, March 15th 2020, we received emails
from most of our distributors saying that they wanted to

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