May/June/July 2006
PNEUS-ONLINE DIVERSIFIES INTO CAR CARE PRODUCTS
Pneus-online, the on-line tyre sales specialist, has recently started selling car care products to its customers. The range includes the GS27 brand from France and the Protech brand from Monaco. ‘This service is provided as an addition to our core activity. Some consumers are not able to easily source these products. We have tested them ourselves and decided to market their car and bike ranges’, explains Alexis Nerguisian, Founder and Director of the site. The product lines offered by the two brands complement each other, hence Protech offers waterless cleaning products whilst GS27 also offers its Diam's brand. Postage and packing is free with orders of three products. Will the site be expanding to include other accessories? ‘We are currently looking into adding rims. It’s in the project phase. It’s the ideal product to go with tyres’, says the Director with conviction.
Pneus-Online first opened its doors in Switzerland in 2001 and, through self-financing, has expanded into England, Austria, Spain and Germany. The company is now located in Dardilly in the 69th Département in France. It employs around ten people and has just posted a consolidated turnover of 4.5 M ¤ equating to approximately 60,000 tyres sold. It has a network of 700 fitting points with pricing between 12 and 15 ¤. The network includes not only service centres and garages, but also independent tyre specialists and even dealers. The area with the most customers is, of course, the Paris region, but the Rhône and Isère regions also make up a good proportion. In order to meet the challenge posed by their competitors, Pneus-Online draws on volume retailing techniques. Although word-of-mouth recommendations amongst its customers take care of an important part of the marketing, it is vital to have good rankings on the internet search engines. This requires constant monitoring and costly investments in hardware and software. And the Founder of the company does not hide the fact that all this effort is aimed at achieving his ambition of capturing 1% of the market, namely 300,000 tyres per year.