The company creates jewelry engraved from children's drawings.
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Happybulle
The Happybulle company was born from the idea of a mum fan of creative hobbies to immortalize children's drawings on jewelry.
Based in Mérignac, the company which started its first orders in 2011 has experienced exponential growth.
It now employs 14 people and is starting to expand internationally.
At two years old, Valentine, Dorothée and Jérôme Cailley's daughter was already making beautiful drawings in the eyes of her mother, who wanted to immortalize them by transforming them into pendants.
The idea is so popular with those around her that she gets caught up in the game and creates jewelry in her spare time, in addition to her job as a genetics engineer at the Bordeaux University Hospital.
She will quickly understand that she is not the only one to grant a sentimental value to the lines, however awkward they may be at the beginning, of her offspring.
Her husband Jérôme Cailley, an executive in a large e-commerce company, helps her launch the Happybulle site to sell her few creations in November 2011. “And there we had several hundred orders without any have no referencing, ”he recalls.
The machine is launched and will soon take off.
Success from the start
In 2012, Dorothée Cailley widened her range of creations to enrich the catalog offered on the site.
“Her hobby is starting to get overwhelming,” says her husband.
The small office in our bedroom is no longer enough and she sets up a creative workshop in our guest bedroom ”.
While working with resin, she began engraving, less time-consuming and easier to mass produce.
In 2013, to cope with the influx of orders for Mother's Day and Christmas, they both work evenings, part of the night and on weekends.
"We are on an exponential growth of 200% per year", underlines Jérôme Cailley, who remembers a trying period.
Convinced of the enormous potential of the business that his wife has just created, he also left his job in 2014 to lend a helping hand.
"We are called crazy by our families and we mortgage our house," he recalls.
It must be said that at that time, the company only achieves 30,000 euros in turnover ”.
A fine connoisseur of the Web, Jérôme Cailley does not hesitate to follow his wife in his adventure: "I was convinced that we had a nugget in our hands and I did not want to take the risk that competition would develop".
High speed change of scale
In 2015, they hired their first employee and the activity is experiencing growing success: orders are multiplying and with it the turnover which reached 1.5 million in 2017. “The activity has always been profitable,” emphasizes Jérôme Cailley .
It must be said that we were very straightforward from the start on our production and sales costs ”.
Today, Happybulle employs 14 employees and its workforce rises to 30 to manage peaks of activity (Father's Day, Mother's Day etc.) At Christmas, orders go from 200 per day to 1000 or even 1300.
The engraving machines used by Happybulle have been diverted from their initial use to allow engraving pixel by pixel (from a photo sent to the site by customers) and to guarantee a beautiful rendering.
“You need a lot of machines and operators to make them work,” he explains.
Where others engrave first names in seconds, we need a few minutes to engrave drawings ”.
Today the site offers a thousand references and adapts to requests.
"We engrave" mom, I love you ", fingerprints, drawings of all kinds etc.
".
Each year Happybulle makes it a point of honor to offer a hundred new references so as not to tire its clientele, mainly women.
To cope with its dazzling success, the company is moving next summer to new premises under construction in Mérignac.
"And at Christmas, we go international, in the direction of English-speaking countries", announces Jérôme Cailley.
The company which has found a promising vein has not finished making people talk about it.
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Aquitaine
Company
Child
Drawings
Hobbies
Jewelry