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~ Intershop ~

careful planning. The company aims at multiple goals and thinner and increase the survivability of the company.
pursues multiple trends. Chief among them is sustainability, I believe Intershop is an amazing tool. I know it, and I know
both a goal and trend. A need, one should say, to guarantee its potential, and I would love to keep working with it,”
that our children will have a planet to call ‘home’. Michael continues.

Regarding IGO’s KPIs, which ones would that be? Finally, what trends do you see in the industry that
“I think the main KPI was to be profitable. Three years ago, could define its future?
we were losing money and now we are very profitable again, “Sustainability is the primary trend. We notice that. People in
we closed a gap of millions in three years. The second KPI was Europe are increasingly more concerned about climate change
that at that time, we had an assortment of 1700 products and because we already feel its consequences. So, you don’t want to
now we have an assortment of over 11.000 products.” leave a destroyed planet for your kids, right?

Finally, I think that the ROAs—Return On Advertising—was That’s why companies searching for business gifts or
negative. We were paying for people to buy from us for the promotional materials are pushing more and more for
first time and hoped they would buy a second time for us to sustainable products. Products made with renewable or
have a small profit. And what we have now is a ROAs of 7 or biodegradable materials like jute, cork, bamboo, and even
7.5, which means that we pay €1 in advertising, and we get elephant dung paper. We are pushing to become fully
€7.5 as direct money back. And that is a big win. And the last sustainable. And it is something that, I believe, will have to
would be the SEO visibility because our SEO visibility was be done by the entire industry. Because in two to three years,
really bad, and I think nowadays we have in our traffic peaks everybody will be pushing to buy sustainable and recycled
of 3000 to 4000 people per day in organic traffic. All of this is materials products. And in two to three years also, we hope to
thanks to the new e-commerce team.” be fully sustainable in all of our products and to be selling up
to 95% of the business online.
Considering this success, how much do you think
e-commerce will weigh in the future of IGO? We have pushed for sustainability and will keep on pushing
“Wow, a lot. In fact, if we check the numbers, we see that for it. We donate to our communities and our society because
almost 85% of all the revenues of IGO are (in)directly we believe in profiting—of course—but we also believe in the
involved with e-commerce. It is the core of our business,” says people around us. IGO is working together with One tree
Michael. planted, we donate money (out of our own pocket) to plant
trees with every order that we have, we already planted over
Does this pose any potential threat? 150.000 trees in de last 2,5 years! So, IGO’s challenge and
“Yes. We are becoming increasingly dependent on one single commitment is to be good for the environment, good for our
sales channel, and that is never a good thing. To give you society, and good for our employees and clients,” Michael
an example, when we had some technical challenges with concludes. ••
our Google product feed, Google temporarily blocked our
campaigns, the entire company felt a drop in its sales.

So, one of our plans for the future is to spread this risk by
reaching more markets and creating more websites—more
e-commerce sites—to deal with those markets. In that way, if
we are down on one site, we will still sell on the others, and
if something is happening in one continent, we might still be
able to work in other regions.”

What are some future plans for IGO?
“Currently, we sell in the Netherlands, Germany, UK, France,
Belgium, Austria, Luxemburg, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark,
Finland, Norway, and Switzerland. We would love to expand
into Italy, Spain, and Portugal, but also into the USA. I’m
sure that if IGO can break into the USA, we will become a
Unicorn.

Another expansion, from a digital marketing perspective, is
to expand into different search engines than Google. Google
indeed drives more than 75-80% of European traffic, but
if you expand into Bing or Criteo, you also spread the risk

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