Vente-Privee aims for revenue to reach €8bn in 2024

Vente-Privee wants to more than quadruple its revenue in the next ten years. The online retailers wants to achieve this by extending the model of flash sales that it once started in France. The goal is to achieve annual sales of 6 billion euros to 8 billion euros in 2024.

That’s what founder Jacques-Antoine Granjon told Bloomberg. Thirteen years ago he started Vente-Privee.com (which is now called Veepee) in France and the site, where products are offered online at a discount for a limited time, is now also active in the United States and several European countries. Last year its revenue grew 23% to 1.6 billion euros.

Vente-Privee goes Dutch
As of today, the France-based company is active in eight countries. According to Granjon the flash sales model just works in Europe. “So I don’t see why we can’t do well in every other European country.” To let the words be followed by deeds, Vente-Privee. has announced to fully translate its website also to Dutch, so more consumers in the Netherlands could be attracted. The amount of flash sales in this European country grew with 52% to 861, while sales grew with exactly 100%.

In home country France Vente-Privee is the third most-popular online retailer. With 840,000 daily visits its ranks behind Amazon (1.51 million visits) and eBay (1.03 million). CEO Granjon is convinced that his company could grow quicker, but he’s afraid that would mean giving up ‘some profitability to invest in notoriety’. He would rather go slower and be profitable. Something the company is, as profit was about 5 percent of sales last year.

The French version of Vente-Privee now generates about 80 percent of revenue, but the goal eventually is letting Europe, excluding France, account for about 50% of all sales. So one market that should get some more growth is the US. In 2011 Vente-Privee teamed up with American Express and this joint venture was the company’s introduction in the US, where it doubled its sales to 37 million euros last year. Next year the company could break even there and Granjon thinks the potential in the US is huge. But it won’t be easy, as it has big competitors like Gilt Groupe and Rue La La.