The corona crisis is creating tough times for business owners and e-commerce managers, and the economy is taking a beating. Yet there are companies that are handling it smartly. In this article, we highlight Online Plastics Group. The company marketed a standard screen that allows stores to protect their staff from the spread of the coronavirus. What is the story behind this well-run crossborder company and how are they responding to the crisis?
How it began
In September 2014, Jonathan Opdam and Geert van Groningen started Kunstofplatenshop.nl. The expertise of Geert, who worked as an interior stand builder, was complemented by the marketing skills of Jonathan, who has his own marketing agency. The two responded to the demand for online sales of plastic sheet material. "You saw a lot of physical companies back then that did sell online in addition to their sawmills, but you almost had to have studied chemistry to understand any of that as a layman." Says Max Bisseling, who came to support e-commerce a year after its founding.
The move to Germany
And since his arrival he has not been idle. Soon he began launching in Germany with Kunststoffplattenonline.de followed by Belgium, Austria, the UK and France. The start in Germany began promisingly until a sudden drop in traffic occurred. "At one point we received a kind of penalty card from Google. We still don't know exactly what that was, but we then decided to set up multiple domain names and webshops." According to Max, Germany is such a large and important market that the risk is too great not to use multiple domains. Across Europe, there are 10 active domain names and webshops for that reason. "You have to spread your chances," said Max.
A desk is key
Online Plastics Group can now call itself a true crossborder player now that they operate in six countries. It is striking that from the beginning they consciously wanted to outsource as much as possible per country. There was a brief attempt to take on customer service themselves, but that too was soon outsourced. "The main reason we work with agencies as much as possible is the natives. They know the country, the consumer and simply have the best command of the language. That's very important". Even now that the company serves many countries, it is nice to work with agencies and maintain oversight. "The nice thing about working with agencies is that you can switch quickly. If something works well for one country, we can easily carry that through our agencies to other countries."
Channel mix
In Germany, the company is active with their webshop, Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest and Youtube. On the latter channel, they are mainly organically discoverable with "how to" job videos and explanations of the materials. They recently cast a native actor who they use in their videos. On Pinterest, they are findable through various mood boards. For this platform, they have also advertised in Germany. "It is a challenge for us to creatively market a product that is not creative of itself. That's where hobby platforms like Pinterest are a good solution."
The impact of the corona crisis
Before the crisis, the company only supplied semi-finished products, but since the lockdown and tightened measures, it now supplies a finished product: the Kuch screen. "Since the lockdown, we and our supplier came up with the idea of supplying standard-size screens as well," says Kuch. These screens we know from the cash registers at supermarkets and other stores are called kassascherm, afscherming or corona screen in the Netherlands. In Germany, they are known as Kuch screens.
Challenges
Pictures were taken and put online and the separate campaigns were set up. Then things moved quickly and the company had to scale up considerably. They now produce in three halls and even the campaigns in ads have been paused for a while to scale up in a healthy way."We are in close contact with our suppliers and we are currently running 12-hour shifts a day to serve all customers. Disappointing people now, in this day and age, that's just not possible." While the crisis creates many opportunities, it is also a challenge. France, for example, is in complete lockdown. "You have certain zip codes where delivery is not possible and we can only ship to private addresses.... In addition, because of the lockdown, in France we are only allowed to deliver on a certain number of days, so plenty of challenges to take into account."
"In 3 to 5 years, we want to be the market leader throughout europe," Max confidently lets us know. "Germany is really incredibly important to us because of the high search volume. We notice that Germany is also growing by far the fastest right now because of the crisis." Nobody knows what the future will bring in concrete terms, of course, but Online Plastics Group has in any case proven that it can also deal with unpredictable and challenging situations such as the Corona virus.
