“By choosing the right partners, we only travel to America once a year. It’s not a must to go there often to be successful.”

Partnering with Lionel Messi as a Dutch company and growing to €40 million in revenue, most of it coming from the U.S.—that’s the story of Ekster, a brand designed for men who want to move stylishly from A to B. We were curious about how they achieved this and spoke with Richard Canneman, founder of Ekster.

1) Hi Richard! Who are you, what does Ekster do, and what is your role within the company?

Ekster was founded about eight years ago by Olivier Momma, Rick Scharnigg, and me. Rick and Olivier met during their exchange program at the University of Pittsburgh and have been entrepreneurial from a young age.

I’ve known Olivier since our time in Tokyo, where he attended high school as the son of a close friend. In 2016, when Olivier interned with me in Singapore, we got to know each other better. Olivier was working on modernizing the wallet and had an innovative vision for it. I was immediately enthusiastic.

At the time, I helped Olivier develop the product and gave him advice. Once he returned to the Netherlands, Rick and Olivier decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund wallet production. They needed €5,000 for the first model, product video, and marketing campaign, which is when I joined!

2) How did you develop the product?

With an investment of €5,000, including promotional videos and a single prototype, we launched a Kickstarter campaign.

The campaign was a massive success—within a few months, we raised over €1 million with our idea. We became one of the most popular products on Kickstarter, which gave us access to the U.S. market.

3) How did you scale the company?

Scaling from scratch to produce and deliver a product at scale was incredibly challenging, but we succeeded. With the small profit from our initial launch, we were able to produce a second version.

Next, we focused on performance marketing. We were very effective in acquiring new customers based on the audience that had previously purchased from us via Kickstarter. This turned out to be a great strategy, as revenue quickly doubled.

Later, we also started focusing on influencer marketing, which we found to be crucial in the U.S. market. We work with a range of influencers, from macro to micro-level.

For example, we released a product line in collaboration with Lionel Messi and Angry Joe (who has 3.3 million YouTube followers). Additionally, dozens of YouTubers review and promote our products.

Sometimes we even discover a new audience by accident. For example, through an experiment, we found that Nascar viewers are a major target group for Ekster.

4) Do you have any tips for other entrepreneurs looking to succeed in the U.S.?

The U.S. is a huge country that is essentially 52 mini-countries when it comes to regulations and taxes, but it’s one unified market when it comes to marketing.

It’s important not to limit yourself to the East and West Coasts. Your audience in the U.S. could come from an unexpected place. Embrace the fact that you’re not American, and use experiments to discover where your customers are.

Marketing in the U.S. is extremely expensive, so starting with guerrilla marketing tactics is highly recommended.

Another tip: ship products directly from the U.S. This will improve your conversion rate and is a more efficient way of operating.

Finally, by choosing the right partners, we’ve managed to limit our trips to the U.S. to just once a year. You don’t need to be there frequently to achieve success.

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