Today we’d like to introduce you to Antonin Gaillou.
Hi Antonin, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Born and raised in France I moved to San Diego in 2014 to pursue a bachelor degree in international business and marketing. I graduated in 2016, by then I had met my significant other and had decided to stay in San Diego. I learned everything about E-commerce after working at Smashtech, a marketing/ health and wellness direct response company located in Downtown San Diego. After 2 years working for them, I decided to listen to my entrepreneurial spirit and co-founded Sambboho with Caroline who I had met during my years at SDSU. Caroline is originally from Brazil and moved to San Diego around the same time as me. Her family owns a workshop in Brazil, and we bounded over our love for fashion, dog, and sustainability. We decided to partner and combine our skills. I would bring everything I learned during my years at Smashtech (running paid social ads, google ads, SEO, and operations) and Caroline brought designs and innovative products ideas for the business. We originally started small on Etsy, and we quickly expanded. Today we have over 1k reviews on Etsy and annual gross sales in the 7 figures. Yet, we still consider ourselves a very small business and we experience challenges on a weekly basis.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Sambboho?
Sambboho is a sustainable Brazilian fashion label with a mission. We are based and operated in San Diego, and we ship from our Vista warehouse. We are known for our beautiful handmade beaded dog collars, but we also have matching belts, bracelets, and more. We are now expanding into the horse accessories market. Our entire production is in-house and handmade. The outstanding quality of our products hasn’t gone unnoticed. We quickly became best seller on Etsy. We were featured on Vogue (our belts were in a Vogue Japan shoot). We also got many celebrity customers from Alessandra Ambrosio to the Kardashian clan. Hilary Duff is one of our followers on Instagram. We are a niche in the pet market. There is no brand that makes high-end, designer-like quality dog collars like ours. Our pieces are full grain leather as our workshop has 60 years’ experience in leather work and used to subcontract for big labels (think like Louis Vuitton league but we can’t name the brands we subcontracted for). We use Slovakian glass beads. All the beads are triple stitched by hand to our leather pieces which makes our products very durable and unique. One dog collar takes 12 hours of work. Our business empowers a local community of women in Brazil. The workshop is organized as a cooperative of artisans. We bring the beadwork and equipment to the homes of our beading ladies so they can work from the safety of their home. We bring back the finished beadwork to our leather shop where the final products is attached. We train many beading ladies. Currently, 53 women get extra income doing something they love from their home thanks to Sambboho. This was a lifeline for many of these ladies who lost their daytime job during the covid pandemic.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
I’m very confident our industry will keep expending within the 5-10 years. Our products are not cheap ($59 to $100 dog collars) so inflation and macro-economic events can impact consumption but overall, the demand will remain. Millenial spend a lot of money on their pets and the pet market has always been somehow recession-proof (although spending on an expensive dog collar is not as recession-proof as let’s say expensive dog foods because although dog owners will not cut on healthy food for their pet, they might think twice before buying this $100 dog collar if they have issues meeting ends meet). Mostly, people are becoming aware of the damages from fast fashion. Our brand is the opposite of fast fashion. We make sustainable pieces with a low cost on the environment and society. We don’t use child labor to make low-quality products that will get discarded, instead, we financially empower artisans to make long durable products with a story and a soul. More and more people are conscious shoppers, and companies can’t hide any longer behind expensive advertising campaigns without concrete evidences of where and how their products are made. Small business with a positive impact on society and is what people what. That’s why Etsy is so successful, and we see the online rise of so many mom-and-pop brands which are really starting to eat away profits from bigger brands with no soul like Walmart and others.
Pricing:
- Prices varies by size because the bigger the collars, the more work it requires
- We have very low margins, we don’t sell products that cost 2c to make. Most cheap items are actually overpriced. A 20$ nylon collar actually cost less than 2 cents to make. Our items require a lot of handwork then needs to be shipped from Brazil to the US. They also use high-grade material like full-grain leather and glass beads. Yet we strive to keep our products under $100. It’s getting more and more difficult with rising living costs that require us to pay higher wages along with higher raw material and shipping costs. We will be forced to raise prices soon.
Contact Info:
- Website: sambbohoshop.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sambboho/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sambboho/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC51ExpZ61sZIXqI-dtMNbRQ/videos
- Other: Sambboho.com
