Mirta

Italy is renowned worldwide for its millenary artisanal heritage, being home of thousands small artisans creating beautiful, unique artifacts in a variety of domains.

MIRTA aims at becoming the reference point for the unseen Italian artisans, providing them with a premium window to showcase their products and with the necessary expertise to compete with the giants of the respective industries, by offering them marketing tools and logistic support.

Founded in September 2019 by Martina and Ciro, MIRTA has soon caught the attention of the Italian financial ecosystem, being able to attract over 70 artisans and to sell over 3K goods in its e- commerce platform in less than 1 year. Supported by a fresh round of €2.5M after less than 6 months since its opening, MIRTA is now accelerating its international expansion and quickly escalating the number of artisans present on the platform, aiming at reaching 2.5M in revenues by the end of 2020, while already reached the 1.5M in revenues over the year.

ENTREPRENEUR & TEAM The co-founder of MIRTA, Martina Capriotti and Ciro Di Lanno, met while working at BCG fresh out of their university degrees. Martina completed a MSc in International Business at LUISS, popping her skills in Marketing & Sales and Operations thanks to her professional experiences at EY and ICCREA bank. Ciro, on the other hand, comes from a family with a strong handcraft heritage. After having completed a BSc in Theoretical Physics at Federico II University in Naples and a Master in Quantitative Finance at Bocconi, he started working in the risk division at Unicredit and shortly afterwards left to join BCG. Eventually, he spent 2 years at Stanford for a MBA.

Having strengthened their business acumen in their consulting years, Martina and Ciro decided to start their entrepreneurship journey and moved back to Milan to launch MIRTA.

PROBLEM & SOLUTION Italy hosts tens of thousands of small artisans, extremely specialized in the creation and handcrafting of extremely high-quality good in a wide range of artisanal domains, from fashion to furniture, from top-end cars to boats. Nonetheless, these artisans usually find it cumbersome to craft an effective go-to-market strategy, and they have no financial means nor digital expertise to reach out to their potential customers, especially abroad. As such, they tend to rely on excessively volatile commercial schedules and are often unable to create a proper brand capable of valuing their products. MIRTA provides a solution to such issues by supporting artisans via the management of their marketing, logistics and customer care. Thanks to a skilled team of business-savvy professionals, they fill the expertise gap of artisans throughout the Italian peninsula, ultimately creating a direct link between them and their customers, skipping intermediaries and highlighting artisans' unique personal stories and creations.

PRODUCT & REVENUE MODEL MIRTA is the first online e-commerce platform dedicated exclusively to the finest Made in Italy luxury artisans.

Currently hosting products in the leather goods (e.g. bags, shoes and accessories) and cashmere categories for both women and men - as well as a section dedicated to pet goods – MIRTA hosts over 70 artisanal brands (with 150 more expected in the next 6 months). It offers them a personalized marketing experience by creating tailor-made pictures, videos and blog posts, earning on customer fees via a classic direct-to-consumer e-commerce model, aimed at maximizing margins due to the lack of intermediaries.

MARKET & COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT As of today, the luxury e-commerce market is valued 39B Eur and expected to grow in 2025 at 90-100B Eur. The environment is populated either by third-party high-end luxury brands (e.g. Chanel, Gucci) or online and offline retailers (e.g. Farfetch, YNAP) operating via middlemen, as well as DTC emerging startup brands like Italic, Everlane, Senreve or Cuyana. MIRTA is currently the only player offering a DTC marketplace for independent artisans.

GROWTH PLAN MIRTA's recent capital raise will be exploited to expand its customer base abroad, in strategic geographies like the US, the Nordics, Greater China and ASEAN. By doing so, MIRTA aims at reaching over 2.5M monthly visits on its website and expand its SKU base up to 2K references in less than 6 months. In the meanwhile, the company will invest in its technological platform, by ameliorating its artificial intelligence and UX features, thanks also to a targeted team expansion aimed at attracting 11 new talents by the end of 2020. Eventually, MIRTA aims at reaching 100M in revenues by 2025 and become EBITDA positive by 2022, with over half a million customers.