Hippe Beebjes
Cherish Rambhadjan and Wilbart van Rijswik, Co-foundersMollie’s competitive rates are excellent for small businesses like ours.
Founded by Cherish Rambhadjan and Wilbart van Rijswik, Hippe Beebjes is a great place for parents looking for fashionable and affordable clothes and accessories for their children. What started as a small webshop in 2014, now fulfils thousands of orders each month and serves customers in a brick-and-mortar store in Zoetermeer.
Finding a gap in the market
The idea for Hippe Beebjes came from Cherish's own interest in buying clothing for her children. She realised that most of the children's clothing she could find looked the same and didn't match her taste with busy patterns, bright colours, and large texts. She wanted to offer the same range of options for kids as adults have. So, when one of the children's clothing companies she often bought from started to offer wholesale, she decided to open an online store for children's clothing alongside her full-time job.
What started as a side project soon became so successful that both Cherish and Wilbart quit their jobs to dedicate themselves fully to Hippe Beebjes, and with time, more colleagues joined the couple.
The challenges of a successful online store
Cherish and Wilbart run Hippe Beebjes with the help of seven colleagues and both wear many different hats, as small-business owners often do. Marketing, purchasing, accounting, and finance are only a few of the tasks the owners take on. Considering the number of orders they receive, they are always working. This fast-paced work life can be challenging at times, according to Cherish, but they always manage to get through the harder times thanks to their great team and efficient use of services available to online businesses.
We can offer a variety of payment options with Mollie, and the statistics available on the dashboard are helpful in making business decisions.
Online services to the rescue
Hippe Beebjes has been using Mijnwebwinkel as their webshop host since the company's founding. According to Cherish, since no one in their team has the expertise to develop and maintain a webshop, working with a trusted partner like Mijnwebwinkel smooths out a lot of potential issues and provides support in areas that can boost their growth, like optimising SEO, using Google Shopping, and more.
Similarly, they find Mollie to be an easy-to-use payment service provider with numerous functionalities that make their work easier. Since they switched to Mollie, their returns process has vastly improved and they can now offer a wide range of payment options tailored to the needs of their customers across markets. For example, they recently started offering Klarna after a while of resisting it and immediately saw positive results.
They are especially happy with Mollie's competitive rates, the payment insights they get on their dashboard, and stability, since outages their previous partner used to have caused them to lose business.
Our tip for aspiring entrepreneurs is to simply go for it!
Looking into the future
Cherish and Wilbart are very proud of Hippe Beebjes's steady growth and are planning to reach even further heights in the near future. They are looking forward to adding more colleagues to their team, reaching new customers across markets, and possibly extending their age range to teenagers for their little customers who grow up with them.