Interview client : Romain & Nicolas – Cadeau Maestro (Part 1)

"Lightbox + Like Box"

A two-part interview, for twice the pleasure. On the one hand, an exchange with Romain, owner of Cadeau Maestro physical store, located in the very heart of Saint-Etienne. On the other hand, an exchange with Nicolas, responsible for the community management and owner of the brand's social media pages. Let's focus on the physical business with an interview of Romain! 

The story behind Cadeau Maestro begins in the end of 2007, starring Sylvain Bruyère, founder of the e-commerce website, and his wife Charline. We know that a company creation comes with a basic idea, but this one is rather interesting. They started the business because they happened to lack imagination on future presents they would buy to each other. The necessity of creating a platform where you could find some crazy cool gifts was born like that. And that's how cadeau-maestro.com was created, with a lil brother in the making who didn't take long to show its head : in 2008, the physical store opened its gate in Saint-Etienne. This first store's main purpose was to amortize the rental costs of a place for the website products, allowing them to gather two activities at the same place : physical store and e-commerce. 

Cadeau Maestro Store

Cadeau Maestro Saint-Etienne today : 2 employees, including Romain who gave us some of his time for this interview. For him, keeping the physical store as a main activity is a necessity. Owning a store is very different in terms of habits compared to a e-commerce activity, and the boutique allows the brand to keep good relations with its customers but it also enables increasing sales for the e-commerce.  In fact, a direct contact with the client enables to gather feedback on the products technical sheet for the website. A shield in the left hand (the physical store) and a sword in the right hand (the digital store), perfect balance.  Plus, with a 70 square meter surface, not all the references can be stocked in the store (which, btw, gathers items from more than 150 suppliers). Cadeau-Maestro works with suppliers from all around the world, from the little designer made in France to the big supplier with warehouses based in Asia. 

But how did our counter arrive in this bizarre temple, you may ask? Well, let's just say that word-of-mouth still have nice & shining days to come, because they first saw our counter in their own city, Saint-Etienne, at Mary’s Coffee. Several counters have since followed the leader and have moved in Saint-Etienne.

Happy Owner is Best Owner

The counter has perfectly found itself among the lighting unicorns, smartphone-covers and light-boxes. Romain also confided us that he enjoys changing the counter's place in the store from time to time. Kind of a physical A/B testing, it allows him to find the perfect place to place the counter that engages his clients the most. But when it's time to light out for the store, the counter goes back to its original place : the storefront. Clients passing in the store find the counter rather seductive, and magical in its usage. Some of them don't instantly understand the "real time" feature of our baby.

Oh btw, it's just a timing coincidence but Cadeau Maestro had an appearance on Capital  2 weeks after they had bought their counter, allowing them to get a huge increase on their social media metrics. Perfect timing! 

Thanks a lot for reading this article focused on the physical business of Cadeau Maestro, we hope you liked it. See you next week for Part II, where Nicolas will tell us about the social media strategy!

I'm out 😉