Simone Sancho, BelongBe: A poor checkout experience for e-commerce brands is a dealbreaker

BelongBe is a beauty and health ecommerce platform giving room to indie brands across the LatAm region, and in this volume we’re joined by its CEO Simone Sancho. She shares her pathway through the beauty industry and sentiments which pushed her to become a business mogul. Simone gives us the insight to her empowered mindset to share her knowledge with other entrepreneurs, all the while being a mother to her young children. You don’t want to skip this volume, filled with tips, motivation, and real-life challenges which have driven Simone Sancho on her journey to success.

You’ve had a diverse career pathway, so could you please summarise the journey you’ve had so far?

My journey is quite winding and complex! I graduated with a qualification in international relations, which sounds unusual but it’s because I didn’t know what I wanted to do at the time. I then completed my masts in economics and begun a career in the financial industry as a trainee which meant I had a lot of time to learn and become exposed to different areas of the industry. Once I left the company, I started my own business in 2011, which was difficult as a start-up in Brazil. Being a woman in the space was hard, and the fact that I was working with only men in the venture, I was the only woman among nine men. It was a challenge, but the great thing was how I learned to do a lot of the roles needed for a business in a compacted period.

In 2014 we sold the company, and I begun working on my next idea for another business, but I was incredibly excited by an offer to join Sephora in Brazil. The CEO is incredible, and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity because of how supportive she was. During my time at Sephora, I realised that I never wanted to leave cosmetics and digital marketing because I really found myself and my passion in this industry.

So that was the starting point of Simone as a woman in beauty and digital work. And I stayed there for six years before I left to pursue my own business and become a mother. While I prepared to become a mother, I invested my capital on small beauty companies. In between, I also joined another company which was very special to me, and eventually they sold the business while I continued investing in other businesses.

I came to the point where I really felt the need to focus on my own business, and in my time at Sephora, I saw a trend in America where there was an absence of indie brands. When I joined Sephora in 2014, approximately 3% of revenue sales were from indie brands, and by the time I left in 2019, it was around 30%. There was a clear demand for smaller brands in the beauty world. This made me think about how it would be in Brazil, and I wanted to be on that journey to help smaller brands with logistics and marketing to help them grow. This company is what we call the powerhouse of indie brands and is dedicated only to businesses like these to help them grow and enter the market. Brazil is now the fourth biggest market for beauty in the world! But 95% of this market is driven by big companies, making it even harder for smaller brands, which is why BelongBe is dedicated to helping indie brands.

Could you tell us more about EVE NFT? What inspired this support to women through Web3? What tools are you offering that you gathered from your own experiences?

In 2020 in the middle of pandemic season we started to organise EVE NFT which would be ready to go to market to help others. Things like Web3 and NFTs and more technical knowledge aren’t often considered to be appealing or ‘sexy’ and my business partner and I wanted to create room for women to learn more. My partner invited me to start looking into NFTs, the Metaverse and all the new digital ventures. She really encouraged me to start this journey and challenge myself. Even when I started looking into the Metaverse, I would ask her ‘is that like crypto?’ which sounds funny, but these are the questions that people want to ask without being judged. There aren’t many women in this market, and in the financial industry, Brazil contributes around 23%, and in crypto it’s approximately 4%.

When my partner asked if I want to join her and I said yes, we begun the venture and it’s something new, but we were the first organisation in Brazil, founded by ten experienced women. We’ve brought together a lot of women and girls from the financial, tech and marketing industries to create a space for women to develop themselves further. We want to see more women in senior positions in companies, and from experience I have seen that at times we can lack confidence or the opportunity to speak up. That is what has driven EVE NFT, to create a decentralised organisation and community that helps women engage with these rapidly expanding markets and learn what they want and need to.

So that was the idea – a revolution to bring women together to engage, learn and feel safe in a space where they may not feel safe in their day-to-day jobs. It’s also about reminding these women that they are valued, needed, and included. We want to change society’s stance on women and their contributions for the betterment of the working world.

BelongBe is a fantastic ecommerce business offering products and skincare. What issues did you need to overcome in terms of purchasing behaviour?

I would say that the most challenging stuff for us was to put a lot of organisations together because Brazil is a large country, and so the brands we work with are scattered everywhere. If we want to include them in BelongBe, then we needed to have a distribution centre in the right place. This is an expensive element to any business, but we of course needed it, which is why we decided to have our centre in Sao Paulo, which is the biggest city here in Brazil. Having one main location meant that operations were easier to run, and one location means that prices could be more competitive for shipping and products, and we are able to offer customers great deals and conditions when all our brands’ products are in one location. So that was our first major challenge to help prepare ourselves for consumers. The second was competition, not for us but between the indie brands. It’s tough because they don’t want to compete on the same platform, and it took a long time to make them understand that they are competing with 95% of the market, and not actually the 5% of brands which are indie brands. You have to overcome hard situations to have a successful business, and its these moments that help create an organised workflow and team, so that we all work together to face the wider market.

How much of an impact do you think a checkout process impacts a buyer decision?

The checkout process is the most important. I would say every step in the journey for a consumer is important, of course, because there is an experience behind the purchase, from having an attractive website and flow of traffic to your site, and then an attractive offering of products, etc. But as a business owner, you can’t make the mistake of letting things go when it gets to the checkout stage. To have a successful conversion, the price, product, promotion, and checkout need to come together into one neat package.

I say to my team here, you can get a visitor to become interested in browsing and deciding to buy something but if you’ve not simplified that stage then you’ve lost the opportunity. It’s so important to have quick, easy steps to complete the transaction, and to keep the shipping costs reasonable. So that’s why we are looking into the checkout step on a regular basis to keep an eye on it and to nail the KPIs we have. We, as business owners, are so concerned about the entire flow and experience, that sometimes people forget about the final stage in checkout. But checkout is something that we cannot make a mistake on there because it can be the dealbreaker.

You juggle a lot of roles and responsibilities; how do you cope with the different pressures?

As a business owner, I’ve found in my own experience that you can’t always segregate personal and professional life. For me, I find that I must give a lot of my time to my career, more than what is considered to be average and so I inevitably end up combining elements of my life. So currently I have two main roles professional, and I need to be there working every day for the younger company; inspiring my team and checking our growth – driving company success, especially because it’s a company that we founded one year ago. When I say I combine elements of my life, it isn’t always a bad thing. I get the opportunity to make my own life easier, like finishing meetings to go home early to put my babies to bed. But of course, when it’s my own bedtime, I have more work to do. But the flexibility makes it much easier to achieve these things.

My daughter is used to me being home with her and having to do work when I am not tending to her needs, that sometimes even she will tell me ‘Mummy, you are going to work now’ and I think that it’s great, because she knows that I am working hard for her. As a working mother, you can combine both elements where you need to and you can use your dedication to work to teach your kids that it’s not something that we do because we don’t like it, but we do it because we want to have the chance to be a mum and get stuck into our own passions.

What advice would you give to others who would like to become an entrepreneur?

Well, it’s hard because I do believe that you must know that to be an entrepreneur is not easy. It’s also not immediate success, because you must be prepared that your vision will change and that it won’t always go your way. Sometimes you will have to put an idea together and then take it apart, and it’s that experience that will shape your success and the success of your business. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a vision; in fact I would have a clear one but become okay with the fact that you will have to adapt your ideas and yourself to the environment you are in.

It is also important to be resilient. Ideas fail and things may not work, but if you can be resilient to change then you will be able to find success. There’s also a lot of discipline needed to keep everything in order. Don’t be afraid of things changing or not seeing success straight away – you must keep that discipline to get the rewards. And lastly, sometimes the journey is what teaches you the most. What you learn from your first business or idea, can teach you a lot that will help you create something else much better. I’ve said a lot, but I would say that you need to be strong, resilient, quick, and unafraid of change and challenges.

How do you define success?

If you asked me when I was a young girl at the start of my career the answer would be to be the woman on top, making a lot of money, with a nice car and big house. But with my experience, I have a different vision now and that is why I decided to be the CEO of a small company that is my own rather than work in a big company. I prefer helping other people to achieve their business goals, even if it means I do not make big amounts of money. It’s what makes me most happy, and that is what I define as success. There is no guarantee that my company will be a great one, and I am challenging myself to do better, but when I look at my journey, every day and everything that I learnt from my team or had the opportunity to teach is what I define as success.