Unable to defeat Temu, the old European fashion platform filed for bankruptcy!

Since last year, foreign e-commerce platforms have received waves of bad news. Etsy announced a massive layoff, Jane.com and Zulily announced their closures...

Just a while ago, Venca, a long-established European fashion e-commerce platform, also announced that the company had filed for bankruptcy.

Venca was first founded in 1976 and is headquartered in Barcelona. It is affiliated to Digital Lola Group and has 42,000 square meters of logistics and warehousing space.

Venca, originally named Venta Catálogo SA, was acquired in 1979 by an entrepreneur from Barcelona and then by 3 Suisses International (3SI) in 1988.

In 1997, Venca launched its own e-commerce platform Venca.es, becoming the first fashion e-commerce portal in Spain. Ten years later (2017), it was acquired by Digital Lola Commerce, and the following year the platform business was expanded to more than 80 countries.

In 2019, Venca launched its own marketplace in a bid to expand its product portfolio with other fashion brands and opened up to new categories such as shoes, jewelry, home, small appliances, beauty and electronics, offering users more than 100,000 products from more than 900 different brands and stores.

At its peak, the platform was comparable to well-known European local platforms such as Zalando, YOOX, and La Redoute.

According to Jordi González, General Manager of Digital Lola Commerce , 70% of the platform's products are its own products, and 30% are from third-party brands. The company currently has about 150 employees, who are not only committed to platform development and product design, but also logistics management. González said that the platform has its own supplier network in Asia and Europe.

However, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the low-price competition from Asian platforms such as Temu, all of this has become history. According to reports, Venca's turnover in 2023 will only reach 21 million euros, far lower than 30 million euros in 2022.

Venca's debt has now reached 7 million euros, but González still believes that Venca is a brand with history and value.

It is reported that most of the platform's debts come from suppliers and other creditors, so the company hopes to reach an agreement with new partners or sell the production line to keep the company running smoothly.

Currently, Venca's orders are still being fulfilled normally until the final result of the bankruptcy procedure is released. Now (as of press time) if you click on venca.es, you can see that except for various discount activities, everything else is normal.

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Bankruptcy

Venca