In just 8 hours, Fabbricatorino achieved an incredible result with collection pledges for 700,000 euro on Mamacrowd, the Italian platform for investments in equity crowdfunding which allows investment in the best startup companies and Italian small-medium sized companies, to immediately reach its hard cap. The funds are added to the 300,000 euro already gathered in the third quarter of 2021 via the underwriting of participative financial instruments.
The startup is one of the investments of the AZ ELTIF - ALIcrowd division, the first ELTIF of venture capital that also uses crowdfunding to find companies to invest in, set up by Azimut Investments SA and managed in proxy by Azimut Libera Impresa SGR SpA.
Alessandro Monticone, CEO of Fabbricatorino made this statement about the result: “We have ambitious goals and we are working towards becoming a point of reference in the digital evolution of the Italian eyewear industry worldwide and achieving a turnover of 20 million with EBITDA of 40% by 2025”.
To do so, the company is planning to invest the funds collected on Mamacrowd to exponentially grow its own business, expanding its digital marketing strategy, adding new technologies and services to support the e-commerce platform, and widening its range of products in order to reach a wider and more diverse public. As a result, in the course of 4 years, the startup intends to expand with 15 new single brand retail stores in leading Italian cities and abroad and widen the B2B network for a larger distribution reach in the Italian and international markets.
The brand wishes to continue on its characteristic path: preserving the tradition of Italian craftsmanship and historic techniques, flanked by environmental sustainability, thanks to the use of eco-friendly materials. This is supported by innovation that guarantees an omnichannel shopping experience. In fact, Fabbricatorino, with an innovative digital platform, can reproduce the experience of shopping in an optician’s store by guiding users in their choice of the most suitable frames, which can be tried at home, free of charge. A configurator also allows users to insert their optician’s prescription and find out the total price (in real time) of the end product including prescription lenses. Later, for the production of the lenses and handover of the new glasses, the customer can visit one of the 120 optician partners around the country or one of the Fabbricatorino stores themselves.
This success has allowed the company to open up 3 single brand retail stores in just a few years in key Italian cities: Turin, Rome, and recently, Milan. In particular, the Turin store is showing a growth rate of 267% as compared with 2019 and the Rome showroom has achieved breakeven in less than 6 months, while the third store in Milan passed the same point in just 26 days after its launch. Simultaneously, the community has arrived at 40,000 members: the online presence accounts for around 30% of the global turnover of Fabbricatorino.