“The goal is to restore confidence in the brand,” explains the general director of the website

After the liquidation of the Habitat stores, Vente-unique.com is relaunching the brand only online. Sacha Vigna, general manager of Vente-unique.com is Franceinfo’s eco guest.

The Habitat furniture brand has seen its stores placed in liquidation and since June 13, Vente-unique.com has revived the brand with some 1,500 references available for sale on the Internet, via the habitat.fr site. Its general director, Sacha Vigna, is the eco guest of franceinfo.

Franceinfo: It’s been a little less than a week since you relaunched the Habitat brand exclusively on the Internet, can we already take stock? What does this reboot give?

Sacha Vigna: Customers are there, since indeed, Habitat enjoys a very good reputation. It is a brand that has been present in France for more than 50 years, so it is an iconic brand that resonates in the hearts of the French. From the first days, there were first orders and our goal, initially, was to respond to customers who were unfairly impacted by the former operator of the brand. They can currently go to the site to fill out a form. But indeed, from June 13, we had the first customers who were able to recommend again.

Let’s talk about these approximately 9,000 customers who were harmed after the Habitat stores went into liquidation. Concretely, these are people who had ordered and paid, what do you offer them?

We ask them to fill out a form which is available on the Habitat website so that we can study their file in a completely personal way, check that they have not been delivered, that they have not could be reimbursed by other means of payment. If necessary, we will guide them for compensation which can be done in particular via vouchers on the Habitat website.

Vouchers for the amount of the order placed?

It will depend on each order. But yes, it is something which is intended to restore confidence to these customers, so of course, we will go towards an amount which is close to their order.

Is it not possible to make an amount equal to the order?

Each case is truly different. We must study them one by one, but in any case, the goal is to restore confidence in the Habitat brand. And it is still something completely unprecedented for a company to come to the aid of other customers of another company.

How exactly are you going to restore confidence?

We will first address these customers who have not received deliveries. Then, it is the strengths of Vente-unique.com which will be put at the service of a very beautiful brand like Habitat. We are going to give them our seriousness since Vente-unique.com is a company that is listed on the stock exchange, so there is real financial solidity. She has aligned 18 profitable growth exercises and therefore we have strong backs. If we are here today, it is above all because we are professionals in logistics and also in digital and sourcing. And so we are going to put all these weapons at the service of an iconic brand like Habitat.

Your main shareholder was the owner of the Habitat brand, but he sold his operation in 2020. There, you take up the torch with this online-only model. E-commerce at Habitat hadn’t really taken off. What are you going to do to change that? What Single Sales expertise will be used?

We were born online and so we put in place all the strategies to sell online and that’s what we are going to do at Habitat. Today, in fact, online sales are all this practical model that we know. For a brand like Habitat, the strategy is to make people want to buy home products directly online and so it is this whole strategy designed first for digital that we are going to implement for a great brand like Habitat.

If we talk more broadly about Vente-unique.com, your turnover in 2023 exceeds 200 million on a market estimated at 200 billion?

Indeed, it is 200 billion, but at European level. Last year Vente-unique.com achieved more than 200 million business volumes in Europe and we have therefore just published figures for the first half which show growth of around 19% on the volume of sales. ‘business.

At the start of 2023, your goal was to double in size by 2026. Is that still it?

Absolutely, we want to double in size compared to today and achieve 400 million turnover by 2029. Our strategy to achieve this is above all customer satisfaction which we have developed on a direct-to-consumer model. This means that we source products directly from factories to deliver them to consumers, which allows us to cut out intermediaries and offer prices that are much more competitive than what we can see in physical commerce.

Is this objective tenable in a sector which is not necessarily doing very well, that of furniture?

It’s sustainable as long as you have happy customers. It is our daily credo to satisfy our customers and provide them with a wide choice of home equipment at very competitive prices, with very good delivery.

You deliver to several European countries. Where are your majority of customers located?

Mostly in France, but we deliver to eleven countries in Europe and we also have many customers in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Italy and even Portugal.

Do you have a recruitment plan and are you able to recruit?

We are always recruiting, of course, and therefore we are looking for enthusiastic candidates who are passionate about the world of decoration and new technologies. We have around twenty positions open and like many people, we actually have some recruitment difficulties in recruiting talents who are both international and digital.

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