Switzerland-based Flummox, an aggregator of online micro-brands, has grabbed $13 million in a combination of debt and equity funding.
The investment round was led by Fasanara Capital that invested in Scalapay, Other investors participating in the round include e-commerce specialised venture capital firm from CEE and an Italian syndicate of Business Angels, including Raffaele Terrone, Founding partner & CFO at Scalapay, and Stefano Pardi, former Head of eCommerce at Facebook.
Flummox will invest the fresh funds towards growing its portfolio with at least 15 new brands and expanding its team with core specialists to strengthen its proprietary IP in sourcing, operating and scaling online brands.
Francesco Filia, CEO of Fasanara Capital, says: “We are very excited to partner with Flummox. In the context of an FBA Aggregator market that raised conspicuous sums of capital despite an often-undif erentiated strategy, we found Flummox a notable outlier in their approach to market and we are looking forward to supporting Marc and Olmo along their journey”.
What does Flummox do?
Founded by Olmo Tancredi Cassano and Marc Marshing in 2021, Flummox is an online brand accelerator that acquires, scales, and exits promising online consumer businesses with proven customer traction and high growth potential.
The company grows high potential online consumer brands into international direct-to-consumer businesses with its technology-driven and streamlined platform.
Flummox focuses on online consumer brands with annual sales under $1 million and a predominant presence on the Amazon or Shopify marketplace. It aims to buy and scale high-potential brands internationally and across multiple online channels.
Flummox plans to acquire over 20 brands that have sub-$1M revenue every year. Also, it eyes to scale operations across Europe to become the leading brand accelerator, powered by a technology-driven platform to grow local brands into international direct-to-consumer businesses.
Flummox scales online brands into category leaders within 18 to 24 months and creates exit opportunities to larger aggregators with similar operational infrastructure.
Solely on Amazon, Flummox targets a pool of over 400k third-party sellers generating annual sales between $250k-1M and an estimated 50k brands which fit its strategy.
How does it work?
Flummox focuses on growing brands that meet a few criteria set by the company. Only those brands that meet these requirements are meant to be promising for the company.
To meet the criteria set by Flummox, the brands should have over 50% revenue from a single channel, a focused product range, leading reviews and ratings, young & high potential market and under $1 million turnover over the past 12 months.
The company evaluates the businesses and starts the due diligence process. After the analysis, legal documents are signed and closes the deal with a fund transfer. After the acquisition, it optimizes the businesses in branding, marketing, multi-channel selling, supply chain, finance, and more.
When the brands meet these criteria, Flummox will buy these brands in the steps detailed below. Notably, it will take up to six weeks to initiate from where we started to now.
Step 1: Pre-assessment of the company
Step 2: Share data and interests
Step 3: Completes in three days
Step 4: Due diligence in 4 weeks
Step 5: Closes the deal & Transfer Assets
Notably, the Swiss startup assures to acquire promising eCommerce brands & accelerate them into flourishing businesses.
