A quick catch-up with Christian Raisson & Philippe de Chanville, Co-Founders of ManoMano, and Phillipe Collombel, Co-Managing Partner of Partech

                                    Philippe de Chanville & Christian Raisson, Co-Founders of ManoMano

ManoMano, the leading European platform for DIY and gardening, announced a €110 million raise on the 1st of April, 2019. With this latest round, the scale-up aims to develop its offering for professionals and its seller experience as well as recruit high profile tech talents and continue its European conquest, especially in the UK market.

We talked with the Co-Founders of ManoMano: Christian Raisson and Philippe de Chanville, and Philippe Collombel, Co-Managing Partner of Partech, who is in charge of the company as an investor. We previously interviewed them in 2017, but we wanted to catch up with them and find out what’s happened over the last two years and how the relationship between the Co-Founders of the funded company and the investor has evolved.

ManoMano created many new services over the last 12 months. Can you tell us more about them?

Philippe de Chanville and Christian Raisson:

Yes, we created three new services for our merchants in 2018. The first is an invoice service. It can be challenging for a merchant to issue 200 invoices per day, so we created an invoice service that solves this problem. The second one is a remote customer service: for instance, French merchants decide to sell in Spain, we then translate their product sheets and help them with their customer service. In November 2018, after a long tender process, we launched ManoMano Fulfillment which is our logistics platform in Gretz. It has three objectives. Firstly, to search for foreign merchants who want to sell in France (fostering cross-border sales). Secondly, to facilitate the marketing of products from industrials who do not have the tools to do it themselves. Lastly, to support the quality of our big merchants who cannot sustain high volumes when there are peaks in activity. In summary, we provide a tool that helps them deliver rapidly.

Philippe Collombel:

ManoMano has a full understanding of the market: the new fulfillment platform enables the delivery of bulky items, helping to increase the NPS by 15 points, and when ManoMano enters a new market, they understand very well their new customers’ expectations. Here they not only adapt to new customers, they create a fully new service designed for professionals.

Their execution capability is quite incredible. By launching Fulfillment by ManoMano, they have demonstrated their ability to keep up with the evolving market. They went from being a pure distributor to being a distributor and manufacturer. Additionally, their new B2B marketplace, ManoManoPro will bring a large number of projects and multi-specialists to the platform. And all this while complying with the allocated budget and meeting the deadlines!

Christian and Philippe, what is the new service that you’re most proud of?

Our most recent service: ManoMano Pro...

You can read more of this chat, here.