The brand focused, headless e-commerce platform Centra has been growing exponentially during the pandemic. During 2020, more than 50 new fashion brands joined the platform to accelerate their e-commerce operations – both Direct-to-Consumer and Digital Wholesale. New clients include Stronger, Craft Sportswear, Eton Shirts, NN07, Verso Skincare, Hestra och Viking Outdoor wear. Centra is now aiming for an aggressive international expansion during 2021, and has made several new recruitment’s to effectively welcome more clients moving forward.
After a short period of adjustment during spring 2020, Centra grew at a steady pace for the rest of the year. The company noticed a short dip in March when clients had to adjust and adapt their businesses to the new reality. But since then, there has been a growing interest from fashion and lifestyle brands in the need to digitize their sales; both directly to consumers and to retailers. In total, more than 50 new leading fashion and lifestyle brands have signed with Centra during 2020. The new clients largely consist of “digital-born” DTC brands such as Stronger, Self Cinema and Stellar Equipment – but also brands with a long tradition of focusing on the physical presence, such as Craft Sportswear and Henri Lloyd, who are now making the switch to a Direct-to-Consumer and “Direct-to-Retail” model in order to grow globally. Centra has also grown internationally and recently signed deals with the
Italian ready-to-wear brand Panchic, Danish NN07, and Norwegian Viking Outdoor Footwear.
Continued international expansion is a strong future focus.
“After the first Covid-19 wave was over, interest in building global e-commerce
solutions increased exponentially. Consumers’ mindsets have changed, and brands are now investing more in the e-commerce part of their business. We are very proud that so many great brands choose to collaborate with Centra to scale globally. We’re running out of brands in the nordics and need to target brands on new international markets to continue our growth goals. Our ultimate goal is to become the world’s greatest DTC/Wholesale e-commerce platform for brands, period.” says Martin Jensen, CEO at Centra.
In addition to the need for Direct-to-Consumer e-commerce solutions, cancelled fashion fairs
have resulted in an increased demand for solutions that digitize sales to retailers – which is
a major contributing factor as to why Centra’s digital wholesale solution, “Showroom”, has won over so many clients during the past year.
Martin Jensen continues:
“Wholesale is a business area that is lagging behind regarding digitization. It has actually been a bit incomprehensible that, even today, people travel to fairs all over the world to showcase and sell their collections. Now that these fairs are cancelled, we no longer need to explain why brands that sell to retailers should digitally transform that part of the business too. In the same way as you sell Direct-to-Consumer digitally today, you can sell “Direct-to-Retail”. It’s pretty obvious.”
During 2020, Centra’s growth was at maximum capacity to be able to onboard new brands efficiently while maintaining the level of quality that is expected. As a response to this, Centra has made several new recruitments during the year, where, amongst others, Marc Dudmish (previously Vaimo and Mynewsdesk) joined Centra as VP of Customer Success at the turn of the year. Centra is still completely bootstrapped and recruitment’s will continue to be financed without external capital for the time being.
“When we entered 2020, we had an onboarding organization that was dimensioned to handle one go-live every other week. When we now sum up the year, we see that we went live with over one brand per week – a double up from what we planned for. Therefore, we had to rapidly recruit new talent to our Customer Success team. We will continuously recruit during the year, and have no need for external capital to be able to do so. A healthy growth rate financed on revenue from new sales is working very well so far. Our challenge mainly lies in recruiting competent people”, Martin Jensen concludes.
For more information, please contact:
Martin Jensen, CEO at Centra
martin.jensen@centra.com
+46 (0) 703392355
Max Brennan, PR and Marketing at Centra
max.brennan@centra.com
+46 (0) 707730397
Centra is a SaaS e-commerce platform for global fashion and lifestyle brands. With a complete offer for both Direct-to-Consumer and Digital Wholesale, Centra helps brands such as Nudie Jeans, Ideal of Sweden, Stronger, Eton, Sandqvist, Craft Sportswear and 150+ fashion and lifestyle brands drive a global e-commerce to consumers and wholesale buyers. Centra was founded in 2016 and is a fast-growing company based in Stockholm, Sweden, Wroclaw, Poland and New York, USA.