Aristotle kicked-off in 2007 from 2 friends working together to sell fashion products for fun. The co-founders, Bhon Raksakulnit and Udthanun Hongmanee, previously working in PR for a famous Thai fashion brand, decided to step out and start their own fashion line, known as Aristotle. Aristotle's signature handbag design is small, round, and imprinted with a rose, a universal symbol of femininity. Today, Aristotle has over 150k combined followers on their social media platforms and their fastest selling record is having sold 200 handbags within 1 minute.

We had the chance to sit down and have a chat with Bhon Raksakulnit about Aristotle's journey from once was just a hobby to a successful e-commerce business.

From a hobby into a business

12 years ago, Aristotle started selling their products offline as a hobby. When the demand for their product caught momentum, they started to experiment online. First by email, then social media, and eventually through their own website.

As of today, Aristotle has almost completely dissolved all its offline operations and are fully focused on their online website as the main sales channel. Currently, around 80% of their sales come through their website with only 20% revenue from their 2 store locations; Siam Paragon and Central Ladprao.

Early challenges

In the beginning, we realized that Thai consumers needed a personal approach when it comes to online shopping. They want to interact with the seller personally to ask about the product details. One of the challenges that we faced when we started selling on social media was that people were hesitant when it comes to making payments (especially when they haven't seen the product in person). It's normal for customers to be uncertain when having to manually transfer large sums of money before receiving the product. But nowadays, it has become the norm. Everyone is used to handling online payments, therefore, having an e-commerce platform is crucial for a business to grow.

Partnering with Omise

The developer who created our website for us recommended Omise to us and we easily integrated through the WooCommerce plugin. During the first period when our website was still new, some customers were still unsure about making payments through an online website. We needed a solution that could gain our customer's trust and ease their behavior to familiarize themselves with an e-commerce platform. That particular solution was provided by Omise, known as the Links feature. This feature allows us to take full control of the transaction by simply creating and sharing the payment link on our social media platforms. Our customers only need to fill out what's necessary to process the payment; name, card number, expiry date, CVV. DONE! We continued using Links payment as our main method on social media for a good 2-3 years and our customers were very happy with how easy it was to make a purchase.

Click here to learn more about Links

Since integrating with Omise, we rarely experience any issues with the system, and when we do, we always receive good and friendly support from the team. In one of our peak transaction periods, we sold over 600 handbags within 1 hour without experiencing any issue from the payment side. As a merchant, we want our customers to experience the best shopping journey and as a fashion brand, we want our website to be pretty and as user-friendly as possible. Omise's payment solutions can provide us with the capability to do both.

Words of wisdom by Aristotle

Apart from a trendy product design to match the consumer's needs, an online merchant needs to be true to their customers and have a great after-sales service for better customer satisfaction. Loyal merchants gain loyal customers. Aristotle values the best customer experience because if consumers receive a bad experience when shopping online, it can affect the e-commerce ecosystem as a whole.