Flashback We look back at how it all begun and what happened year by year with interviews, memories and anecdotes from a ten-year long adventure. Prehistory plan, funding, sourcing, product assortment and starting the company etc. After spending his evenings and weekends working on the Looking back today, 2008 seems a bit like website, Pierre joined her a year later. prehistoric times. Instagram didn’t exist The adventure began in their apartment, and you poked people on Facebook, whilst which became the company’s office and admiring your brand new iPhone 3G. Nobody logistics platform (surely the only one in could have imagined ordering anything with the world to be located on the fourth floor their phone. Yet today, already 22 million in a building without a lift!). The website 12 people in France buy online and it is obvious was developed by Bruno Lévêque who had that the web will continue to revolutionise just created PrestaShop at the tender age consumer behaviour. of 24 and whose premises were just a few It was back in these uncertain times, when hundred meters away. Pierre and Cécile did the excitement at the exponential growth everything themselves (purchasing, web of online shopping was tempered by the design, photo shoots, uploading content, arrival of a worldwide economic crisis, that customer service, marketing, advertising Smallable saw the day. In the words of the and press relations etc.) with the help of site’s founders, Cécile Roederer and Pierre two trainees who were totally crazy about Rochand: “It was a time of great expectations the whole adventure. Everything was and the fear of our lives”. Both had left their homemade, but the market positioning and jobs in marketing and advertising to start the foundations were laid and ten years later their own business and venture into an they still haven’t changed. Their slogan back online world they didn’t know much about. then sums up their objective pretty nicely: The penny drops To amaze children and make parents’ lives When she saw her friends and her sisters easier. spending hours trying in vain to find something a little bit different for their children to wear, Cécile realised what a An unknown toy, a little distributed great idea it would be to bring all the best Scandinavian brand and products exclusive designers together in one place – and thanks to the site… Creativity knows no borders and to the Internet that was now possible. In Smallable decided to take the risk and offer 2007, she left her job and spent the next year the crème de la crème of fashion and design working on the project: concept, business to as wide a public as possible by creating a