With Christmas just around the corner and a few hours from the start of Black Friday, Amazon chooses Rome to celebrate the excellence of Made in Italy and relaunch its support to Italian SMEs. The “Amazon Made in Italy Rooftop” initiative was in fact an opportunity to bring together under the Lantern of Fuksas 15 successful companies from the food & beverage, beauty and design sectors, chosen by the American giant to represent the best of local businesses and Italian artisans that have grown over the years thanks to eCommerce.
“The Made in Italy showcase has existed on Amazon since 2015 – explains the manager Rita Polarolo – and today it sells over a million products from Italian small and medium-sized enterprises throughout Europe, the United States, Japan and the Arab Emirates”. Amazon also collaborates with the Foreign Trade Institute for the training of companies in eCommerce and sales on foreign markets: “Currently on our platform there are 18 thousand PMs, of which 3500 are certified Made in Italy, but these are numbers that are constantly growing, as companies understand how online is a fundamental channel for internationalization and landing on other markets. A channel that must not replace retail – adds Polarolo – but rather support it to intercept new customers ».
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A cultural change that had already been underway for some time, and which has now accelerated with the pandemic because, “on the one hand, it has accustomed customers to looking for products online, with 88% of Italians over 14 who buy online. On the other hand, companies have taken the opportunity to update and digitize themselves ». After all, Amazon itself has invested 16 billion dollars globally to finance initiatives in support of this “cultural shift”, for example by providing free consultancy with the “Accelera con Amazon” project aimed at all entrepreneurs wishing to do eCommerce. regardless of which platform they then decide to use.
After all, the experiences on show at the Lanterna confirm that online sales channels offer space and opportunities for growth for everyone: there is the case of Mobili Fiver, a company from Pordenone founded and managed by five brothers, which for over twenty years works in the wood sector and in the production of furniture components and design products. “We used to produce furniture for third parties, then in 2011 we started selling first on ebay and through our ecommerce site – says CEO Ronny Gobbo – Since 2014 we are also on Amazon and, in these ten years, we have only grown “. Starting in 11, there are now 120 and the furniture produced in their factory is sold throughout Europe exclusively online under the Mobili Fiver brand, as they prepare to land in the United States. Meanwhile, in the first half of 2021, the company recorded a + 190% in sales compared to the same period of the previous year: “The advantage of selling only online, through its eCommerce and Amazon sites, is that it has no intermediaries and being able to take care of the relationship with the customer directly – Ronny Gobbo always reveals – by fully controlling the customer experience and receiving timely feedback to improve the products ».
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Moving from furniture to food, the experience of llGustonline.com is also very interesting, an entrepreneurial initiative based in Ariccia born in 2018 from the passion of two very young boyfriends, Giorgia and Francesco (at the time they were in their twenties), and which today is the best-stocked Online Shop in the Castelli Romani. “We started with the idea of selling only online to act as a link between the quality of our local producers and the Italian market, while now we are ready to expand also abroad”, explains the co-founder Giorgia Barbati.
The story of the Nigerian-born entrepreneur Alice Edun is also beautiful: “Afroricci is a company that was born from the personal need to better take care of my hair and which, thanks to the collaboration with a Milanese laboratory, has given life to a line of products dedicated to women tired of straightening their hair ». Founded in 2014, the company immediately focuses on eco-sustainability and today boasts “97% natural products, sold in recyclable paper and cardboard packaging and in recycled plastic containers. Also in this case, «we started immediately with an eCommerce site, and then we landed on Amazon. Today we mainly sell in Italy but also in France, Germany, Austria and Spain », Alice Edun concludes.
These are just some of the stories of entrepreneurship and innovation staged at the Lanterna. Stories in which eCommerce is once again confirmed as effective both for growing and opening up to new markets, and for canceling the negative effects of the pandemic, when it does not even allow us to take advantage of it. As revealed by the latest “2021 Report on SMEs Selling on Amazon”, in 2020 over 18,000 Italian SMEs recorded sales abroad of more than 600 million euros and, to date, have created over 50,000 jobs in Italy to run their online business.
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