The marketplace has been launched with the support of payments global leader Visa, communications agency Banda, and informational assistance from the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.

About Made with Bravery

The marketplace features items of different categories for different ages and genders from the best Ukrainian manufacturers: clothes, footwear, accessories, household goods, as well as food and beverages that have a long shelf life and can be delivered.

Made with bravery delivers to many countries. You can view the complete list here. You can view the marketplace website at https://shop.brave.ua and learn more about buying and paying for your order here.

“We want the entire world to fall in love with Ukrainian products and establish a belief that Ukrainian means cool. That’s why we created the Made with bravery marketplace. And that is why we have high criteria for the marketplace merchants. Our goal is to pleasantly surprise foreign buyers with Ukrainian products and quality of the service and to make “made in Ukraine” an integral part of their everyday lives,”

explains Mykola Paliyenko, CEO and co-founder of EVO.

The marketplace transfers 5% of the price of each purchased item to United24, the fundraising platform initiated by the President of Ukraine. A special platform commission directs these funds to the relevant programs for rebuilding Ukraine. Furthermore, an additional 5% is transferred to United24 to support and rebuild the country if the payment is made with a Visa card.

“Supporting small and medium enterprises is one of the global aspirations of Visa. Ukrainian business people heroically continue to work in tough conditions, holding the country’s economy on their shoulders. It is our duty, as big businesses, to create conditions for expanding their markets. Thanks to the initiative of all partners, this project not only opens international opportunities for Ukrainian producers but also supports the rebuilding of Ukraine,”

notes Vira Platonova, Senior Vice President and Regional Director of Visa in 17 countries.

Why is it important

According to data from the Kyiv School of Economics, the total amount of direct damage to infrastructure reaches $114.5 billion. Therefore, supporting the reconstruction of the country is very urgent, because it requires significant funds. Every purchase at Made with bravery is a brick in the “new walls” of Ukraine. It is the underlying idea behind the first communication campaign of Made with bravery. It is illustrated by this promo video.

“With our first communication, we want to convey the very idea of the marketplace to foreigners: by buying Ukrainian goods you are helping rebuild Ukraine. Every purchase has a new sense, becoming a metaphorical brick in the new walls. We used the characters in the video to emphasize the bravery of our producers, who continue to create and manufacture despite the destruction caused by the Russian missiles. The video itself was made by hand in the stop motion style to convey the spirit of the Ukrainian craft better,”

explains Oleksiy Dyvysenko, Creative Director of the project at Banda.

Everyone can become an ambassador of the project and support Ukrainian producers by spreading information about the marketplace among foreigners. You can download the visuals here.

About the marketplace

Shafa.com.br was launched by the creators of the Ukrainian Shafa (shafa.ua) after its acquisition by EVO in 2018. Now the Brazilian marketplace has 500 active sellers offering 40,000 items. The turnover is doubling annually.

The current team led by Anton Yermolenko will continue to develop shafa.com.br. EVO will help with technology and expertise.

“Brazil is a completely new market for us, and it is a big challenge. We invest a lot in the development of entrepreneurship and the construction of marketplaces here in Ukraine. I believe this experience will help us build prominent projects far beyond its borders as well,” Vladislav Chechetkin, Rozetka founder, commented on the deal.

“E-commerce in Brazil, with an annual turnover of more than $20 billion, is among the top 10 largest in the world and growing rapidly. Shafa is one of the largest and fastest growing marketplaces in Ukraine. We believe that we will be able to migrate the project development experience to the new market and build a breakthrough and in-demand product,” said Mykola Paliyenko, CEO at EVO.

About Shafa.ua 

Shafa.ua is a service for buying and selling clothes focusing on conscious consumption. Here Ukrainians sell new and previously owned merchandise or come to shop. On Shafa, you can buy clothes, shoes, accessories, cosmetics, perfumes, and household goods. The site’s objective is to motivate people not to throw away things in good condition but to give them a new life.

• In 2020, Shafa.ua featured 21 million items for sale.
• During the year, the marketplace was visited by over 30 million people, 200,000 of which became sellers.
• In March 2021 alone, 9+ million customers visited Shafa.ua, and the sellers added 3 million items for sale.

According to Andrei Zdor, Chief of IZI, the company has launched the service to meet the increasing demand “In summer of 2018 we conducted a survey and learned that almost 40% of online buyers have already been selling and buying goods person to person with additional 20% ready to do the same. We are developing a new efficient product for them.”

First users of the platform were clients of other EVO-owned marketplaces. During the time of closed beta testing they placed 45,000 ads. Currently, about 50K people are using the services.

“Our goal is to create not merely a notice board but a culturally new project: a community of polite and considerate users. We are creating a marketplace that makes selling and buying things an easy, pleasant and safe experience,” Andrei Zdor argues.

It should be reminded that in 2018 Rozetka and EVO Group announced their merger. According to a source of AIN.UA the deal is worth somewhere between $12 to $15 million.

The information about the deal became known for the first time in the middle of August. Within the framework of merging, Rozetka bought all the shares owned by Naspers in EVO Group. According to AIN.UA the transaction amount could be between $12-15 million.

The parties assured that after the merger all services of the companies will continue to work. The services include online supermarket Rozetka.ua, the marketplaces, such as Prom.ua, Satu.kz, Deal.by, Bigl.ua, Shafa.ua, Crafta.ua, trading platform Zakupki.Prom.ua, online services Kabanchik.ua and online service of electronic document flow Vchasno.

“We increase the speed of development of the Ukrainian e-commerce market by this deal. We will continue to improve service and customer experience, invest in infrastructure and launch new projects. We do it in order to become an integral part of the life of every Ukrainian. We want to use our products to make people’s lives easier and more convenient,” the founder of EVO Group Nikolai Palienko commented.

Earlier AIN.UA reported that Rozetka became the third most expensive Ukrainian brand according to Novoe Vremya online magazine.

Since the moment of transaction many changes have occurred. Let’s start from the team. How many employees do you have now?

Right now we have 12 employees [Editor’s note: The original article was published on March 07, 2018] . Our team is quite small. We try to hire the employees, who have high skills in diverse sectors. It means that they can contribute to performance of various tasks. If we are short of hands, we can use resources of EVO Group or search for the executor through our own service – Kabanchik. It’s not a joke. In most of the cases it is even faster: you place an advertisement, assign a task and get a result. Often this refers to Designers, Layout Designers and Copywriters.

How deeply are you involved in business yourself?

For the period of the company’s operation we have managed to build the processes in such a way that nobody notices if I take a three-month trip. To be honest, the company will be able to operate normally and have progress even if I am not there for half a year. I also search for weaknesses in the service and try to fill these gaps. I am playing the role of the person, who deals with strategic planning: I try to understand what we will be like in a further few years and what should be done for this purpose.

So, how do you see the service in the next few years?

Our goal is to cover all regions of Ukraine to a maximum extent as well as to provide
an opportunity to find the executor in the most diverse categories on our website. We have started from delivery and today, using our service, you can find a nurse or choreographer. In fact, we have to ensure that upon necessity to find an executor of any kind of works, the client should always think about us. It will take a certain time, but even now we are pretty good at it:

50,000 of executors from different cities already work using Kabanchik.

One more thing, we start working with networks. For example, now our partner is a network of construction stores “Leroy Merlin”. We have special offline stands, where you can come and order a service with the assistance of a consultant. In future we are going to place an advertisement near every product, which has to be installed: you buy the goods and a voucher for services. The store hands over such voucher to our skilled worker and you get the full service. We also have an idea to cooperate with housing complexes in order to provide their dwellers with an opportunity to order diverse works and services directly from our local representatives.

Do you have foreign countries in your schedule?

We look at Kazakhstan and Belarus, but we do not develop these markets. The matter is that we see still a lot of things to be done here in Ukraine. Therefore, the Ukrainian market is a priority for us. In future, we see the potential of entering to other countries. However, I suppose that it is not Europe, but rather the African and Asian countries.

Speaking of the future, Uber is going to buy thousands of cars to create, in fact, their own taxi service. Airbnb builds hotels. Actually, the companies partially move away from the initial business model and launch traditional businesses. Do you have something like this in mind – to create your own team of, let’s say, plumbers?

Actually, I have such an idea. It is caused by the reason that we already see the demand for such services on the part of huge corporate clients who can become our regular customer. For instance, a network of stores: from time to time they have something to repair or fasten. It is no sense to employ their own team and it can be a problem to engage third-party contractor – it can be not so fast, or the way of payment is unacceptable as they have to pay cash from the secretary’s personal account instead of transferring corporate funds. It would be more convenient for them if we became the company-executor and could send them our team at any time. Now we are working on the model where we will not hire plumbers, etc., but will have “permanent remote employees”, able to perform just our assignments.

How do you work with new cities and how do you find executors? What marketing channels do you use?

It is quite simple. Our service has internal analytics and we know where and what kind of services users need. Therefore, we can see that in one of the cities somebody is looking for a repairman. If there is no repairman or their number is too small, we can arrange a search by ourselves and find a local repairman, call him and offer job through our platform. To reach a critical mass we can call a few people and place advertisement in regional editions: sometimes it is one of the ways how we search for executors. Further a buzz marketing works: if the executor sees that there are continuous orders and everyone honestly pays – he/she will tell the others about it. The same is with the user who gets high-quality service and starts recommending the service to colleagues.

You take nothing from a user, but collect an interest from an executor. How do they response to this?

We have no problems as an executor obtains access to the service, continuously providing the latter with job. To make it clear, we have some executors, who have more than a thousand of feedbacks: you can imagine how many tasks they have performed. And this example is illustrative of many others. The average time of response to user’s request is about 2 minutes. Kabanchik enables the executors to find tasks faster and almost without intermediaries: interface of the service is almost the only thing, which separates the executors from a user. Moreover, the executor pays a fee just in case if the task has been performed. We have examples when people, due to a huge number of orders, engaged assistants and, as a result, opened their own business. Something that comes to mind: a girl cleaned apartments herself and now she has 50+ employees and she is our corporate client (“Kabanchik” provides an opportunity to perform task not just by a person-executor, but also by the company).

What is the amount of fee for using the service?

For an executor it is 10%, but it shall not exceed 500 UAH per order. In other words, if you order a repair that is estimated at 50,000 UAH, the executor will pay just 500 UAH. Corporate clients can get additional bonuses for 1800/3000 UAH for the period of 6/12 months.

What is an average check for the services today and how has it changed?

We began with 40 UAK, and further it was 150 UAH. Now an average check for the task makes 600 – 800 UAH. We have about 30,000 orders each month.

The last amount of the company’s revenue, publicized in the media, is dated 2015, when you announced the acquisition. At that moment you had 3 million UAH of revenue per year. What do you have now?

I cannot disclose our financial situation. However, if earlier we earned 3 million UAH per year, now we have at least twice more per month. We are not loss-making and all that we earn we invest in development.

Kabanchik’s team

You have never disclosed conditions of the deal. Firstly, did angels, who had invested $60,000, withdraw from the shareholders’ structure? Secondly, have you been paid in cash or EVO equities?

An amount of the deal is not disclosed. I cannot also tell about the form of payment: money or equities. As for the angels – yes, their shares have been bought.

Well, let me rephrase the question: do you now work as a hired employee?

No, I don’t. I will only say that I am interested in growth and development of EVO business.

Photos are provided by the hero of the article.

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