2' min read
2' min read
A micro artisan company specialising in glass fusing, which produces high-quality artistic glass objects, from favours to design objects to gift ideas. Sospiri, based in Camponogara (Venice), experienced its best moments before the financial crisis of 2008, when it had 20 employees. Then it was forced to downsize, and the pandemic threatened to deal a definitive blow: 'We make gifts, mostly favours and gift items: with people forced to stay at home and events such as weddings and christenings postponed, we could have been out of business. Selling on an online platform gave us a new opportunity,' explains Stefano Rizzi, administrator of Albatros Srl.
Managing everything through the proprietary site would have required a lot of effort, time and expertise. The choice to sell on Amazon proved to be a winning one for such a small business: 'The strength of the platform is to convey trust and credibility even in a brand that has no marketing campaigns behind it. It allowed us to maintain a business even during the Covid period, and so we began to know its potential. In the same way, the advice we received and the support structure allowed us to sell in the US without having to explore the taxation of 50 different states on our own. We can thus concentrate only on the product, delegating other functions and purely administrative aspects: "And what we needed we learnt: for example, suitable packaging for fragile objects, which had to be entrusted to a courier instead of being sold in the shop. We learnt to work better than before and to solve the problems that arose. There are four of us, and we alternate between production and office". Today, more than half of the turnover goes through Amazon: 'Now the challenge is to maintain the position we created for ourselves when online competition was less strong: in this sense we were pioneers'.
