New Post: How simplifying the production of customized merchandise led this Lisbon startup to raise $19M - The advent of the Internet combined with the ability to customise items such as clothing long ago created a revolution in marketing, especially for merchandise purposes. I think we’re all familiar with the ‘merch’ phenomena by now, no? Benefitting from that long-term trend is SME-focused, customized merchandise startupBizay, which has been able to raise a significant funding round, even in this relatively flat market of 2023. Following a Series C of $38.6 million (€32 million), which I reported on in 2020, the Lisbon, Portugal-based startup has now raised a Series “C2” (not yet a full series D) of €18 million ($19.78 million) in order to push into the US market. The round was led by previous lead investor Indico Capital Partners which was once again joined by fellow Portugal investors Iberis Capital and Lince Capital. That takes Bizay’s total funding to €72 million ($79 million), though, when asked what they think the company’s valuation is now, a spokesperson demurred. However, outside observers may well surmise a valuation of anywhere between $180-$220 million at this point. Suffice it to say, it’s not entirely surprising that customer merchandise continues to do well. Companies love to send out brand merch, and because of technological advances, the market just gets easier to serve. As of 2022 the global Custom Apparel market size (that’s clothing only) was valued at over $48 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand to reach $70 billion by 2028. Customised T-shirts alone are projected to be worth over $3 billion in 2025. Bizay says its ’special sauce’ is a supply chain system for product customization which combines merchandising, packaging, apparel, and a wide range of product customisation, and has managed to ram down the costs and up the number of product categories it can serve — even down to customized company-barded watches, if that’s your thing. Over a call, Bizay co-founder Jose Salgado, told me: “We see an increasing trend for customization across many different segments. It’s a way for them to self-express.” And Salgado says if, for instance, the Texas Broncos wants 50,000 customised T-shirts the company has “invested a lot of effort.” “We are able to be competitive for small quantities, but also for medium or large quantities. We’ve done an extensive work into R&D, understanding how to scale. This is about industrial production. There are these huge setup costs. What we enable our suppliers to do within the same job is to be producing several orders at the same time. With that, there’s a huge, huge cost saving.” He points out that the company has “no factories, no machines, no stocks” but is instead enabling a fairly complex value chain to deliver products: “We can have the three production suppliers within the same value chain because for each of th
