Thomas Van den Heuvel
My name is Thomas. I'm the [co-] founder of The Foldie. We have been working with Reach for three months now.
Before working with Reach we were selling mainly in the US, but because the company was growing so quickly, we wanted to expand to other markets, like Australia, the UK, Europe. But setting up these entities and getting an accountant to handle all the tax related issues that come with going international - we had to figure out a new solution because it was becoming very expensive, with all the accountants. And it took a lot of time for us to figure everything out. And that's when we saw that Reach offered the Merchant of Record service. This was something we didn't know about before, but it helped us immensely to open up new markets in less than a month. You're basically set up. The compliance is taken care of, and you just have to focus on building your business and growing it. And that's what we really love about working with Reach.
So we founded The Foldie - me and my sister founded The Foldie - three years ago. We came up with the idea of selling foldable travel bags during Covid. Of course, people couldn't travel back then, but we had the idea that, once travel opens up again, it will be a travel boom. And especially people buying a lot of travel products. And, we were right about that, fortunately. And since then, we have been, like, creating new products, within our foldable travel bag range. And, so far, it's become a huge success globally.
So, when working with Reach, I found that especially the communication was very smooth and also the implementation process, because we've worked with other companies in the past, and it's always difficult to get in touch with someone higher up. It's always like a junior or someone that doesn't really know what's what has to happen. And I've found that with Reach we were able to set something that seems complicated up in less than three weeks. So, yeah, that was super smooth. And we're very happy with that. And I think that's what makes Reach unique. They care about the customer, and they want to see you succeed, and they want to do it in a timely manner.
So, since working with Reach, we launched in the UK and Australia so far and we've noticed that our conversion rate has increased. And also, we have less complaints, and chargebacks from our customers. And I think that's mainly due to [the fact] that we have an entity in Australia and in the UK. And that's of course, that's Reach’s entity. And I think that also builds trust with the customers. So before we were working with our own entity in Europe and in the US and our customers in Australia, in the UK, they were like, is this a legit company? Can we trust them? And we had a lot more chargebacks back then and [I] think now we're at less than 1%. Which is great.
In the past three months, we were able to reach two huge milestones since working with Reach. We've been able to hit 10,000 orders in the UK and 10,000 orders in Australia. That's something we would not have been able to do without, without the setup.
So, what I would say to other companies who consider working with Reach, if you are an e-commerce brand that is selling to mainly one country like the United States, and you want to start selling in international markets, but if you think it's a bit difficult and also time consuming to figure it out, I think it's a good idea to reach out to them. Because you can basically set up a new market, you can duplicate your existing campaigns and just run it in the same language, basically. We were able to run our English ads on English websites, to the UK, to Australia, and soon also in Ireland.
So it's basically super simple to add another 10, 20, 30% on top of your current revenue. And I think that's just worth it. And on top of that, the transaction fees are way lower with Reach. Currently if you sell in another market, there is another currency, and there is a currency conversion fee. And those, they tend to add up. And that's something that's holding a lot of people back because you don't want to pay 6, 7% in transaction fees. But with Reach it's as low as 3, 4%,includingthe fee that Reach charges. So, that's amazing for us and it has been a game changer.

Svéa Van den Heuvel
So, my name is Svéa, and I'm the co-founder of Foldie, and we've been working with Reach for about three months.
So we started The Foldie three years ago, and we are actually selling foldable travel bags. So that's our main business. The whole concept is having foldable [luggage] and everything that makes traveling easier. So we have a few different products catering to that.
The challenges we've been facing are primarily expanding to new markets. So we started the business in the United States. We are ourselves from Belgium. So it was already a bit of a leap to start in a big country like the US. But then expanding to other countries is another challenge. and then we wanted to expand to other English speaking countries like Australia, the UK or Ireland, but we didn't really see the possibility to do that because [they] have all kinds of tax regulations. So it's not that easy to just jump in another country and do the same. So that was one of the main challenges for us.
So we've only been working with Reach for three months, but I think everything has been very positive, like from the start. Until now, the setup has been super easy. It took a few weeks, I think, to implement everything. So much faster than we ever expected it to be. And, all the partnerships, like, people we've been talking with, are super kind and helpful and, yeah, super, super happy. a positive experience for us.
So we have different products and some products are working better in some countries and some others in other countries. When you, for example, have overstock, we can just move some of the stock to another country like Australia where you have other seasons as well. You have summer & winter on both sides of the country. so some of the products we can just easily switch to Australia, for example, and then, like downscale a bit on the US side. And that's become easier, because we can manage our stock levels better and it's just easier to get our products distributed.
Well, I would say that they should definitely do it. It's an easy way to get into other countries, and it doesn't take a lot of effort from the founders because we have a lot of things to do and not enough time to do everything. So having those extra hands feels like a part of the business you can just give away to someone else. And that's really is game changing for us.

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