“E-Sales Box’s slogan is ‘Leather Goods Expert For Your Brands.’ We specialize in leather. We provide services in the leather goods product group, and we also have a brand that produces textile products.”
As Magazine Leather Publishing, we conducted an interview with Mr. Akif Güneş, CEO of Boaletta, PLM, and E-Sales Box, in the leather and leather products sector, about “leather goods and the digital sales platform E-Sales Box.”
Mr. Akif, could you first tell us a little about yourself?
Mr. Alparslan, welcome and hello. First of all, as Magazine Leather Publishing, we are very happy to host you here in our office, a platform we follow with pleasure.
If I talk about myself, my name is Akif Güneş, I have been in this sector for more than 25 years, I have been serving in the bag and leather sector. I graduated from Istanbul Yıldız Technical University Engineering. I love my job. If I talk briefly, we are currently serving in the leather and fabric sector, bag sector with 3 different brands.
First, Boaletta is our main brand. With this brand we now have active customers in more than 30 countries. Our second brand is E-Sales Box, which is a sales platform. We provide certain services through this platform. We will talk about it a little later in our conversation. Thirdly, as our PLM case brand, we provide services in the group we call computer bags, fabric group interteks.
There, our target audience is generally domestic, domestic retailers, chain stores, wholesale sources, stationers, in general, we serve in this way.
One of your most prioritized activities at the moment is E-Sales Box. What is E-Sales Box? What does it cover in the leather and leather products sector and what kind of services does it have? Could you give us detailed information about these?
Of course with pleasure Mr. Alparslan, our business is an infrastructure with 25 years of international experience. We have around 30 active office team here. We spent 3 years in China, so we had an active company there. We have experience in India. We have manufacturing experience in Türkiye and international sales experience.
When we put all these on top of each other, we are a structure that has tested and served in different categories, from a housewife to a chain store with 500-1000 branches.
When we add all these together, we need to do something. We need to provide such a service that we need to provide a service to everyone who wants to produce leather products, who wants to produce business, who wants to make a brand, who wants to open up to the world. We wanted to transfer our experience we gained from our Boaletta brand, our experience in a brand, our experience in PLM, making a brand, making a brand and making it in the international arena to a platform.
Because in the process, we have encountered very successful customers and friends who are doing their job very well in different categories, in different categories, both in Türkiye and abroad. But we have observed that the places where they are good in general, that is, the missing parts of them, are more related to product and product development, manufacturing processes, their logistics costs, and their deficiencies in planning them.
This is the sales side…
In terms of production, there are thousands of products.
Producing Apple’s watch band and producing a ladies’ bag, a dopp kit, a makeup bag have different variables. For this, you need good craftsmen, good stores, good teams. But it takes serious effort, time and budget to reach an experience and infrastructure that can organize this globally.
We said, let’s transfer our know-how to a platform and provide service with it. E-Sales Box is a platform that emerged as a result of this need and this desire.
What services does E-Sales Box provide and what sectoral needs does it meet?
E-Sales Box actually has two sides. There is a selling side and a producing side.
We are already the producing side. And we know the needs of the selling side very well, we have years of experienced analysis. Our starting point is what does the sales person need? We try to fulfill that need by building on it every day. We provide services in three main areas. The first subject is B2B Business.
In other words, the person has a store anywhere in the world or does online trade. He wants to buy products and buy products with our brand or his own brand on the platform where he is located. We provide this service. We have 50,000 to 100,000 products that we keep in regular stock in our warehouse.
There are more than 500 collections, there are colors. Any E-Sales Box customer can become a member of our system as B2B and make a package from the products there after system approval. He can ask for his own brand on it. We prepare it for him. We ship it to the country of its choice with its brand, box, cloth, in short, its packaging.
He can sell it in his store, he can sell it online. This is the first service we provide. The second service we provide is Dropshipping, the customer does not take the risk of the product. He does not invest in stock. After becoming a member, the products in our stock will be sold under the consultancy of a customer representative, if you are in the Netherlands, the variables of bol.com are different if you are in the Netherlands, the variables of selling on Amazon in America are different, the variables of selling on Ebay are different, the variables of selling on Etsy are different.
E-Sales Box is a platform that enables the customer to sell the products needed according to the platform and decided together with the customer representative consultants by taking special photos according to the customer.
Here, our customers, for example, choose 20 products, those products are photographed on a special ground, in Etsy tracking.
Then it is forwarded to the relevant customer. He sells it on his own platform in his own online store. And the products he sells are ordered to us on our system. Our related friend ships it to the end consumer under the name of our customer.
What does it provide in this way? It does not enter the stock risk. It benefits from international cargo agreements. We provide all services related to photography. We try to support the content, photographs, infographics that it needs to sell that product as much as we can.
Another advantage is our international shipping agreements. Any online seller can go and do all of this with small budgets.
Anyway, the starting point of this business is how can we provide services to people who are very successful, focused on their work, who want to be successful, how can we support them? It is a system that started with this intention. Here, in addition, we say to our customers who sell products on Shopify or WooCommerce different platforms that sell products on the web page, we say that you make your own brand, let’s make integrations with our system, let our direct content products and stocks connect live to your platform, you market them with your own knowledge, your own skills, your own advertising management.
When the order comes, send it to us and we will send them. Here, we only say to our customers who make this integration, of course, they can integrate it into all products, they can enter the operation to sell to all products. But that is not the right method. The right method is to specialize in certain subjects through a customer representative, again by talking to our customers, because it is not possible for one person to sell everything. But E-Sales Box sets out with this claim.
Today, when we say Apple’s watch bands, we are talking about thousands of products. When we say phone cases, we are talking about thousands of devices, we are talking about thousands of products. We are talking about thousands of products from the accessory group we call make-up packs. The listing of all these categories is a wall in front of serious advertising budgets, serious time, serious labor and expertise. We also serve our customers who have made such integration by eliminating it with customer representation.
Another issue is what we call OEM Sourcing in E-Sales Box, that is, you are anywhere in the world or anywhere in Türkiye, you have your own design, you are a designer or maybe you have not studied design, but you want to make your own product or you want to make changes to an existing product. I can give dozens of examples of another product that has never been sold in our relevant customer representative or on our platforms. You want to design it, we provide you with that service together with the customer representative, such as design, product development, production.
Therefore, from a single point, from a single station, we provide all the services you need to become a global brand in leather, which are related to our product side.
In addition to this, if there are any technical issues that you need to sell, we have friends and companies from whom we receive services, not within our own organization, but in the system we call outsourced. We direct those companies. They can make agreements on their behalf. They can benefit from their experience. This automatically creates an ecosystem. We have companies in many categories called Print on Demand that provide this service. The point where E-Sales Box differs from them is that we are a direct manufacturer.
In other words, an E-Sales Box customer works with a leather specialist and manufacturer. So the intermediary is eliminated. In this regard, our customer does not encounter anything that says you will pay this much money to be included in a system. In general, what can we say is a vendor-friendly platform?
It is a nice platform, in fact, we can say that its place in the digital transformation of the sector is fully in place. So how can a customer reach you? How can he reach this platform? For example, I want to sell a product, but this product does not only include bags, but also clothing, is it also available in different clothing categories or is it only available in the accessories section?
E-Sales Box‘s slogan is “Leather Goods Expert For Your Brands” We specialize in leather. All of our product groups are leather. In other words, we have additional bag groups, but we do not enter textiles. We provide services within the scope of what we call leather goods and we want friends who aim for vertical growth in this field. We want friends who think long term.
Online commerce is a very good thing. You can reach thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people. There are also examples of making money very fast. I’m not saying that it can’t happen, but what we call our goal is to grow the brand in this way, like growing a small child, by putting on top of it every day for a long time. We are currently serving dozens of brands.
After all, our team, the E-Sales Box, is working. But at the forefront, the brands of our customers are growing, and we are happy together as they grow. Because every product they sell is produced in Türkiye. In other words, one of our craftsmen produces it, our teams produce it. Its material, many issues are finished here and sent there in the name of that brand.
Let me give a very simple example. Let’s say you were selling the following product and you made your own brand here. We sell it under the Boaletta brand. It is in our warehouse without a brand. When you sell it anywhere in the world, a significant proportion of customers now want the product with personalization.
The category we call Print on Demand. They want to write the name of their spouse, child or dog here. You can write it on laser or you can do it with hot printing. So let me put it this way, it is very difficult for hundreds, thousands of people, everyone who does the work, to do this printing. The machine needs to adjust the temperature. It is different everywhere, different in laser, different in hot printing.
E-Sales Box‘s team provides all of these services. I mean, we have friends who have been in the printing business for 10 years and 15 years. If everyone spends time learning in the same way, then this country will become a completely outsourcing country. Instead, we say forget everything that keeps you busy and holds you back from selling.
Share it with us. Our team will give you the service to do this. This is our starting point. Are we doing everything perfectly? We are not. But we are a company that strives towards that perfection. In this regard, we are waiting for our platform for all those who want to do their own business, who want to be in e-commerce or who have a store, I want to sell more boutique products, I want to sell more niche products.
As far as I know, I think there are already existing subscribers.
It has been about 6 months since E-Sales Box was established. We are at the very beginning of the road right now, frankly, we have a lot of shortcomings, but we know the needs, we are going by putting on it every day. We haven’t done any advertising. We only have 262 members as of Monday and we have members using our active system. Some of them are just experimenting, some of them have made progress, but let me put it this way, on average, there are a few applications almost every day.
Of course, we cannot give approval to everyone immediately. A customer representative friend of ours sends an e-mail, negotiates or gives membership approval within a system. Membership is free. But obviously, we close the accounts of people who have become members and do not use their accounts for a long time.
We are looking for companions, so to speak, who will use the system more actively, who will set off with us, who want to set off, who want to make money from this business and who are not in a hurry.
You look at it as a subsidiary sector, for example, you are a student and you want to make money from this job and you want to do other things. You want to make at least a little extra, an income…
Actually, it’s not quite like that. Now we serve a housewife, a student, a student, a white collar, a teacher, a lawyer, an engineer, all of them in the system. That is not what I meant there, actually.
Unfortunately, but unfortunately, I say unfortunately, I am very upset, I see from some publications, especially in e-commerce, e-commerce is already a virtual thing and there are a lot of virtual promises. We don’t make that promise, we just say that we offer you something real, we offer a real project, we make money from the product. We want to share our earnings with you. Are you ready to do this together? If you are, we offer you 25 years of experience.
We offer you our production experience, international market experience, product experience, consultancy experience for free. But if you are looking at this business temporarily, please do not engage us and do not engage you.
But unfortunately, I see systems that do similar work, their entire revenue model is based on making the person a paid member of the system. Afterwards, it may or may not happen. There are successful examples there, I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s also a way.
As for us, the biggest feature of E-Sales Box is that we make money from the product. Our customer will sell products so that we can make money. In the same way, he can earn money. But when you start a business by taking on a certain burden, the expectation is too high.
In this way, so to speak, we provide our E-Sales Box customers with a time to make money, to trade, to spend money on advertising, to spend money on the platform. This is what I am talking about. Otherwise, of course, we want to start immediately tomorrow and we want to sell a thousand that day, we also have stories that start like this.
For example, an order today says that 100 doop-kit orders came through my system. He says he sold 1500 dollars only to one customer and it’s a new account that just started. Of course, we are very happy. There are too many such examples.
We only have E-Sales Box customers in our business and we only have customers who live from this business. In Türkiye and abroad. In a period of 10 years and 15 years, we have customers that we provided the same services before E-Sales Box, but now we have customers with a turnover of over 1 million dollars that we have moved to the platform.
All of these are the accumulation of years. We want to share this accumulation with our friends who are motivated by new excitement. This is the basic spirit and essence of E-Sales Box.
So, what kind of a method does your website esalesbox.com follow?
They will enter the system, there is a login section, it says Crit account, that is, there is a customer account creation section. The whole system is in English, by the way. We have many customers from Türkiye who are members of the system. Of course, we would have liked to serve them in Turkish, but globally, trade is currently in English.
There it says create an account. You create a new account. The account is created by entering your information on it. After the account is created, it falls to us as an e-mail. After our approval, the confirmation mail comes. After the approval mail arrives, it starts to review all our products in the system. We assign a customer representative simultaneously. They communicate with friends who are members of the system and customer representatives. Then the process starts.
As far as I understand, it doesn’t take too long.
We usually give our approval to the system within 24 hours. Sometimes, of course, the mail falls into spam or something. But usually the system can start on the same day.
Well, I would like to talk a little bit about your Boaletta brand. How did you start your adventure? As you just told us, you have a 25-year adventure. Can you talk about it briefly?
As I said, we have two brands there. One of them is PLM, we make computer bags there. Fabric group, which we call interteks. There are backpacks, laptop bags. We also provide different corporate services. We also make different designs that can be produced in the intertex group. On the PLM side, stationeries, chain stores are our target audience. We currently have products in many chain stores in Türkiye, either directly or indirectly.
In our Boaletta brand, we now have a history and a past with Türkiye’s production power and the ability to touch leather.
We started leather here after we started bags. For the first 5 years, we were continuing with normal bags, but then we started leather because of the intense demand for leather at a fair we attended and Türkiye’s ready-made production power. The way we started leather, we are a company that wants to make our own brand and sell our own brand since the first day, we want to produce value.
This is the purpose of E-Sales Box today. Do not lose those who want to produce the produced values again for 20 years. Let’s share it together, a structure that goes to the slogan. What did we do on the Boaletta side? We dress Apple products. That’s our main starting point. We dress Apple’s phone cases, tablet cases, MacBooks, watch bands, AirPods, AirTags in leather for the entire category.
All of our products are what we call full grain, the top layer of leather, all handmade and all produced in Türkiye. In other words, some of the accessories needed are brought from different countries, but almost all of the production, in terms of materials in terms of labor, is a product group produced in Türkiye. The Boaletta brand was born out of this need.
We still have products in almost all of Europe, both online and in many offline stores. We are currently actively selling in many countries in America and Russia. I can list 6-8 countries in Australia, Dubai. So we are actively serving in around 30 countries. We need something meaningful to communicate this experience to our customers. We first established the B2B of our Boaletta brand, so let’s turn it into another platform. Now we have moved Boaletta‘s B2B to E-Sales Box.
You are both innovating within your own company and benefiting other company groups at the same time.
Yes, that’s exactly right. The biggest feature of our company is transparency. Our employee in the warehouse, our master in the machine, and our external customer can access the information they want to reach. He says something very critical here. It reaches the information it wants to reach. We are not a closed structure, therefore, we benefit from the know-how of all our domestic and international partners who are actively engaged in this business in our country, both to the extent that they open up to us and we open up to them.
This is the basic rule of creating an ecosystem. You have to share. It is classically impossible to take without giving and give without receiving.
You mentioned that you use genuine leather in your products. There has been a perception study on leather recently, what is your perspective on leather? After all, we consume meat on our tables. Today, there are concepts of changing the perspective of leather on the agenda of the world. What would you like to say about this issue, what are your thoughts?
Now actually this is not something new. It’s just that as digitalization and communication channels increase, there is actually a kind of culture that is enriched, where people share their own freedoms, their own free thoughts more.
What you are talking about is actually veganism. Now the starting point of veganism says that products that harm animals, products containing animal products should not be used. I’m going to come out a bit harshly. Whatever is the imposition that they shouldn’t be used, is the imposition that they should be used. Do you understand? So we are not there, from our point of view, leather is a waste material.
I mean, meat is consumed in the society, in the world. Just as there is a group that does not consume, there is a group that consumes. This is a result of the natural life of the ecosystem. The meat consumed has an outer material, the skin, so this will either go to the garbage or be reused. What we are doing today is ensuring reuse. We ensure the continuation of the ecosystem, the first issue.
But on the other hand, we respect those who say I am against this in this ecosystem, this should not be used, but it should not be imposed. The number of vegan products we use is not small. I also use leather, I also use vegan products.
I don’t think a material can be replaced by another material here. By the way, the places where vegan materials should be used are not few. Because if everyone used genuine leather, there wouldn’t be that much leather anyway.
After all, Polyurethane products are obtained from petroleum. Actually, it is also a natural cycle. When you look at it, the consumption of those vegan products, those products derived from petroleum, polyurethane products is also more risky today.
Therefore, the critical issue is to be able to balance the two. Today, we have customers who demand vegan products, especially in the USA. We produce for them. We don’t say anything different to them, anyway, producing, both supply-demand and production is a matter of respect, that is, what you do is respect for work.
If your customer is happy with your product and wants that product from you in a useful way, I have to provide that service. The main thing is that I focus on my service. Of course, we need to be sensitive to the environment. Today in Türkiye, not only us, but the world standards are already used in the leathers produced in Türkiye.
This is not outside that can harm human health. Today, for example, for example, there are phone disguises coming from China, plastic transparent, even within our company, our friends use them. I cannot say why you use it. But I do not let my children in my family use that transparent plastic.
After about a month of use, if you can still use it, if you can still put it in your child’s hands, I say don’t use leather.
It’s a good point of view, actually…
Today, many of my guests say that after a month or two after using leather, which I took the cover and threw it away, I started to understand it now. Because the pleasure of touching something natural is like nothing else.
It is definitely a sustainable material in itself.
So, do you participate in fairs? Global fairs, fairs in Türkiye?
That’s what we’ve done in the past. Especially in the first years of our establishment, we participated intensively in all the well-known fairs related to our sector, bags and leather in Taiwan, Hong Kong in China, Germany, America and Italy.
After 10 years, we have data that can analyze fairs. Of course, we participated again from time to time, but we have only participated in a total of 5 fairs in 15 years. We did not participate in other fairs except for the insistence of a friend or the fairs that we said it would be better to appear here, which is a very critical fair. We do not have a goal of participating in the short term. Because we find the customer digitally. Our customer also finds us digitally. But right now, I can say this. One out of every two of our customers now comes on recommendation, so since we have been doing this for years, one out of every two customers comes with a recommendation.
We will probably keep going down the same path. But business is fluid. Marketing Marketing business is a fluid thing. We think that’s the right thing today.
Leaving this impression already increases the customer base.
I wish you a good bargain.
Thank you very much for joining Magazine Leather Publishing. If there are any other words you would like to say, of course we would like to listen to them.
As I said at the beginning of our conversation, producing is a very valuable thing. Magazine Leather was a platform that did not exist. The magazine of the leather industry produced a value. I have been following it since the first day, and I respectfully congratulate you.
I would like to thank you.
That’s what E-Sales Box is all about. To produce brands in leather. Let thousands of brands come out of Turkey. It’s not necessarily that we give them ideas, we give them know-how. Maybe it starts with us, and then it can do other things elsewhere. But we need to produce brands. Our country needs brands. I mean, today, price competition is not right for our geography.
I mean, at the end of the day, we are a country with a population of 80 million, so we cannot compete with people and countries with a population of billions. Our ecosystem, our idea of marketing, our idea of opening up to the world needs to go with different variables, it needs to go with information, it needs to go with brands. It needs to go with products that have awareness, and I think you are contributing to this. So we support your stance there and thank you.
Thank you very much for your perspective. Let’s say that I hope E-Sales Box will set off from Turkey to the world as the representative of many brands. Let’s close the word here.
Thank you again.
“The kitchen is on us, as long as you sell.” Thank you very much.
