Discover Nuoo, an organic and natural brand that has made a name for itself thanks to their beauty box. Julie and Maxime Richard — siblings from Orleans co-founded Nuoo in 2017. Nuoo is an e-shop with a wide range of health-conscious and accessible cosmetics with more than 4000 products from 170 different brands. Along with this, at the end of 2022, they started carrying their own brand! Nuoo has chosen to invest in all possible acquisition channels (Ads, SEO, influence, etc.) by financing them with Silvr.
Hundreds of products to discover online and in-store
In the first month, Nuoo had more than 300 subscribers to their beauty box. This is thanks to their strategy which revolves around notoriety. Six months before their launch social networks were already abundantly fed to install and communicate their history: which is of a brand committed to respecting the skin and the planet. Thanks to the natural products in its catalog Nuoo easily manages to convince influencers to work with them.
But as with every launch, there are pitfalls: Julie and Maxime are focused on development, logistics, and financial resources. Since the launch of their e-shop, they offer more than 200 products for a dozen brands, therefore the management of stocks and shipments of parcels is cumbersome and expensive. When they started, they developed their sales platform on Prestashop and later migrated to Shopify. "We were not e-merchants, we had to put in place the subscription strategy [with the beauty box]. We had mountains of boxes delivered to us at 40°C. We couldn’t wait for the warehouse which arrived later.”
Financially their omnichannel strategy has a cost. In addition to their e-shop Nuoo quickly found a place in brick-and-mortar stores in Orléans and later in other French cities. This first pilot store promptly met with some success which confirmed their choice of omnichannel.
Natural products for people of all ages
Specializing in the sale of organic and natural cosmetics, they now have more than 4,000 products in their e-shop from more than 170 brands. With so many products available the brand seeks to cover all bases, such as cosmetics and make-up for the:
- Face,
- Body,
- Hair,
- Sun protection,
- And post-tattoo care.
But also for all customers: women, men, children, or babies.
Nuoo’s most significant success is their beauty box, it's a stepping stone for those who want to clean up their skincare routine. Because “the principle of this box is not only to discover new brands, new products but to offer the beauty box that we would have liked to have and which did not exist. »
New at Nuoo…
Nuoo is no longer just a multi-brand retailer, but also an e-shop that offers its own brand products. Since the end of 2022, Nuoo offers its own brand of products. They specialize in hair products for curly hair "because the demand is enormous, and for the anecdote - we have a lot of people with curly hair on our teams". The PMF of this product is good, as it was sold out after being for sale for only 2 months.
Online and in stores: Nuoo is not afraid of renewal
The brick-and-mortar store that served as a trial run was opened in June 2017. It was opened in the city where the sister and brother team are from - Orléans. Soon after the 5 other stores in Lyon, Nantes, Clermont-Ferrand, Rennes, and Angers opened. For the time being their clientele is mainly French-speaking with a minor share of sales made in Belgium and Switzerland. The desire to open physical stores mainly stemmed from so many clients wanting to test the products before purchasing. The objective is to develop the sensory approach in sales. As a result, online sales have doubled in each city that has a store.
Silvr to fund all of their acquisition channels
Nuoo’s co-founders met a Silvr Investment Associate at Paris Retail Week. The financing of their stocks “is the foundation. Without stocks, you don't sell, and you don't earn income.” Nuoo's inventory financing is all the more strategic since, as a multi-brand reseller, storage is entirely taken care of by the company. With Silvr, they quickly unlocked their inventory financing. To date from this logistics warehouse, there have been 60,000 parcels sent out each year.
”As a multi-brand reseller, the financing of our inventory is key. With Silvr we quickly unlocked financing for these inventories. We can now deliver the 60,000 packages from our logistics warehouse.”
Julie Richard – Co-founder & CEO of Nuoo
“Regarding stocks, it's always a matter of having a little, but not too much; being cautious, and finding the right balance. Silvr is the perfect financing solution for our business.” Nuoo’s products are often subject to sales events and limited edition models which means they must be prepared in advance. “There are new editions almost every two months. For example, this problem of anticipation and preparation arises every Q4. There is a cosmetic advent calendar (around 10% of the annual online turnover for Nuoo) and this advent calendar is sold out 3 weeks before the launch.” There is a strong seasonality that should not be overlooked.
Ads, SEO, emailing, and influence…
Going through Silvr made it possible to quickly release financing to reduce their WCR (Working Capital Requirements). “What we liked about Silvr is the responsiveness of the team and how they were able to release our funding.” Nuoo is well aware of the stakes surrounding the acquisition so they activated Silvr financing on demand to invest in all acquisition channels: SEO, emailing, Ads, and influence. This is interesting today as the cost of this acquisition exploded after Covid and the GDPR standards have tightened the room for maneuvering in terms of outbound strategy. The results for Nuoo: an overall growth of 5% over the last financial year. Before that, this growth was 30%, and 90% the year before.
The background story
The Richard siblings, the originators of Nuoo, Julie, and Maxime shared with us the story of when Nuoo was created. Julie was an engineer in product formulation and was passionate about organic cosmetics. Julie is now in charge of product development, retail network development, and logistics. Her brother Maxime completes the duo perfectly as he went to business school so he now manages everything related to e-commerce and financial management of the company.
The brand still has plenty of exciting things in store
We have already told you about their online presence and their 6 stores where you can find their vast product catalogs - “We're not going to stop there… As for the French capital, it's our first e-commerce city in France, so we'll be there physically one day. Going international will also come, however, there is still market space in France to continue our focus here. We will probably expand to the rest of Europe around 2025.” The objective is to continue to develop their network of stores. By the end of 2023, at least one more Nuoo store will open and there are about thirty that Julie tells us are on the horizon for 2027.
At Silvr we admire the beautiful organic growth of Nuoo, a brand where projects seem to flow as quickly as their growth. We expect some pleasant surprises in the future. To learn more about Nuoo, check out their Instagram page and give them a follow Instagram page.
If you haven’t shopped at Nuoo yet: take advantage of a 10% discount on their entire catalog with the code NUOOSILVR
