Monica Cadogan on Vivre's blitzkrieg from Romania to region, and on its international sales boost

While she explains the technology behind the making of a glass, and how this influences the price of a glass, Monica Cadogan speaks fast, as if she’s trying to put as much information as she can into every minute. The mother of three girls, Monica, a tall, determined woman with a firm handshake, does not run a glass - making business. She runs Vivre, a EUR 7 million online home & deco retail business which has expanded to three more countries, apart from Romania, in just two years. So she was forced to learn many things, including how glasses are made, and how to be efficient with her time. She speaks confidently, and information seems to come to her without trouble at the right moment in her speech. She also likes to make fast decisions and act upon them. In fact, the idea of being free, flexible and fast in making decisions and in turning them into reality is what kept her in the entrepreneurial field, rather than driving her to shape a career as an employee. “It is very hard to find a company in Romania giving you that kind of freedom,” she says. Monica, 33, is not just the CEO, but also a shareholder in Vivre, which she co-founded in 2012. Her business partner Calin Fusu, the founder of Neogen, is majority partner in Vivre. They met via a dating site owned by Fusu in the early 2000s, and kept in touch. Eventually they starting doing business together. Since 2009, Monica has also been a board member with Neogen. Being a woman-entrepreneur, and now a mother of three, has never stopped Monica from pursuing her goals. „I have never been discriminated for being a woman in business. On the contrary, I was admired for doing it. People judge me for the quality of my work, for my professional skills, not for my gender. Women would rather have to deal with their own limiting thinking. Being a woman – entrepreneur is an incredible position, with little to no competition in Romania,” Monica says with confidence. The business she runs, which uses the flash sales model combined with the idea of a club, has quick expanded into new markets, after the 2012 launch in Romania. In 2013, it opened the first store in Bulgaria, and towards the end of the year, in Hungary. This year, it opened the Croatian online store, and it is looking at Poland and at other markets in the region. International expansion came as the Romanian market, where Vivre has almost 800,000 registered users for its online store, was not enough. The region was chosen for the lack of a long culture for home & deco products, for similar client tastes and behaviors, more open to the products Vivre sells, as compared to more mature markets in Western Europe. Vivre's strategy is to promote the same kind of products, with three-day flash sales, across all of its markets, which solves the stock problem many retailers have. The expansion move has paid off: international sales were half of Vivre’s total sales in the first five months of 2014. Monica’s aim is to reach a sales level of EUR 20 million this year, more than double on the previous, and international sales would probably bring half of that. „We expanded geographically because these countries do not have a large critical mass by themselves. This is a game of numbers. We anyway limit ourselves to the people who are online, who are interested in home & deco products, who choose to register on our site, and who have an immediate need for such products so as to buy it. To reach big numbers, you have to either improve the conversion between these categories, or increase the base, and we chose to pursue both at the same time,” she explains. More of a technical person than a creative one, as she admits – even though creativity and art run in her family - Monica runs a team of 115 people, 65 of whom in her office, and the rest in the company’s Bucharest warehouse. Talking to people is both her strong point, and her favorite part of the job, and this is visible in the way she interacts with everyone around her. Of the team of 65, 15 are foreigners, and speak the languages of the countries where Vivre expanded: Bulgaria, Hungary and Croatia. The retailer’s strategy was to have the entire team in Bucharest, even if it was mirrored in higher staff costs, and to coordinate all the international markets from the Romanian hub. Opening a new market means opening a Vivre site in the new country’s language and selling in the local currency. Call center and support is done in the local language, and customers even call a local number. But somebody based in Bucharest is at the other end of the phone conversation. The team in Bucharest serve markets that now have around 300,000 registered users, and which have the potential to bring increasing sales. Monica herself likes to speak to clients now and then. „In the beginning, and perhaps even now, I would have to check, my personal mobile number was printed on all the packages we sent out. Some people called me in the early days, to ask for this and that, and I liked to hear what they had to say,” she reveals. It was her own way of being in touch with their market. „Many of the people I was speaking to had never ordered online before, or never ordered home deco products before online,” she further explains. Working on building Vivre in the last two years has not only taught Monica many things about the various market niches they work on, but helped her gain experience in recruiting and then managing a large group of people. Her first lessons in what it means to manage people came quite early on in her career, at 23, when she started her own company, and when she had to manage about 10 people, all of whom were older and more experience then her. „It took me about two – three years to get used to the pressure and the stress, and to learn how to deal with them efficiently,” Monica remembers. The beginning of Vivre also meant the start of a hiring campaign for Monica – she hired all the key members of the team. The word ‚team’ is something she seems to have mixed feelings about. She values the team as it was team work that pushed Vivre so far, so fast. „Vivre is not the project of one person. It has three parents, myself, Andras and Alexandru,” says Monica, referring to Andras Nagy, the chief technology officer, who also has 5 percent in the Vivre business, and Alexandru Ionita, the marketing manager. She also likes working in a team, rather than by herself, which is why, even if most of her activity at Vivre can also be done online via the intranet, skype calls and e-mails, she likes to work in the office, rather than at home. But she does not believe in team decisions. „A decision is made by a head, and in one’s head. But what leads to that decision, all the questions and the possibilities before that person makes the decision, these are the results of team work,” Monica says. The Vivre CEO also coordinates the buying department, a team of 14 people, and deals with international expansion and investment decisions. This is partially why she knows so much about the products sold by Vivre. They have 200 different suppliers each month, and her department deals with commercial contracts with these suppliers. „A byproduct of our work was that we learned a lot about our suppliers, their products and their industry,” Monica explains. Suppliers and the way they perceived Vivre were one of the key pointers letting Monica know that Vivre was on the right way. That, and the increasing volume of orders starting September 2012. It was then when she realized Vivre was going to be a success. „It is a success story, we are working on making it a successful business too,” Monica Cadogan concludes.