Dutch online wood shop Gadero expands to France

Gadero, an online shop for wood and wooden furniture, has expanded its ecommerce activities to the French-speaking market in Western Europe. The Dutch retailer will now deliver wood to Wallonia, Luxembourg and some northern parts of France.

For Gadero this marks the third language area where it will be active, as the Dutch ecommerce company also has entered the German market in the summer of 2018. Gadero doesn’t cover the whole of Germany, or France for that matter, as the orders are sometime quite big and Gadero takes care of the logistics itself.

70% of orders go from warehouse in Groningen

Currently, about 70 percent of the orders get shipped through the warehouse in Groningen, a city in the northern part of the Netherlands. The remaining orders happen through dropshipping. If Gadero wants to further scale its business abroad in the coming years, it will consider building a copy of its Dutch location somewhere hundreds of kilometers abroad, like in the middle of Germany.

It’s the success of Gadero in Germany that has led to expanding the business to the French-speaking part of Western Europe. In Germany, the company started slow, so it could learn what would work and what wouldn’t. The German assortment will be doubled this winter, so the German shop will feature about 4,000 items.

Goal is 500 orders in French-speaking market in 2020

For the French-speaking market, founder Henk Jan Bijmolt is aiming for about 500 orders next year. “We can’t possibly translate all 14,000 items at once, so we focus on the typical Belgian products first, like Padouk and Ipé wood for terraces.”