A fourth-generation Spanish furniture manufacturer bet on marketplaces before its industry did. Today, it sells 500+ products across more than 50 European marketplaces with only a team of four managing them.
At-a-glance
70%
of total sales now comes from marketplace sales
50+
marketplaces live across Europe, managed from one platform
6X
growth in peak monthly sales since early marketplace selling days
500+
active products maintained across every channel by a team of four
Why a 28-year-old furniture manufacturing brand started selling on marketplaces
Angel Cerdá (opens in a new tab) has been making furniture in Spain since 1998. For most of that time, they sold the way most furniture businesses did: regional sales representatives across the country called on traditional shops and built relationships one retailer at a time.
In 2020, CEO Andrés Cerdá, the fourth generation of his family to lead the company, decided to try something the industry had largely written off: selling its products through online marketplaces.
Furniture was considered too bulky, too expensive, and too tactile to sell online at scale, let alone across borders. He decided to try it anyway, starting with a single channel, Maison du Monde (opens in a new tab).
Nobody thought a traditional furniture company could sell across all of Europe by internet. It sounded crazy at that time, but Andrés took that step without knowing if it would work. He was brave, and he was right. — Diego Sierra, Marketplace Manager of Angel Cerdá
The bet paid off. But it also created a problem.
The hidden challenge of selling on multiple marketplaces: every channel has its own rules
Selling on Maison du Monde worked well enough that Angel Cerdá wanted to repeat it in more countries and across more channels. That's when the company learned what makes multichannel selling hard.
Before you start, you think every marketplace is the same. They all have a commission, shipping fees, and catalog attributes. But once you're selling on them, you realize they're not the same. Every channel does it a little bit differently, and that makes it difficult to manage if you're doing it alone.
Diego said that every marketplace wanted its catalog built its own way, with its own attributes, commission structure, and rates. The team originally managed it with spreadsheets, uploading product data by hand, waiting on each marketplace's feedback, correcting the file, and uploading it again. It was tedious work that created a ceiling on how far the company could expand.
In 2022, Angel Cerdá created a Mirakl Connect account to find and evaluate new marketplaces. By 2024, it was time to use it for more than research and networking.
When you grow your channels, you need more capability to handle them. Mirakl Connect lets us manage all our marketplaces in one place. It's very easy to manage all the catalogs, orders, and customer messages. — Diego Sierra, Marketplace Manager of Angel Cerdá
How a small team manages 500 products across 50+ marketplaces
Angel Cerdá now sells over 500 active products across more than 50 channels, run by a commercial team of four, plus seven people in customer care, each owning a set of marketplaces.
That works because product data lives in one place and goes out to every channel with the right attributes for each, instead of being rebuilt in a spreadsheet for every marketplace.
Angel Cerdá moved its existing Amazon business onto Mirakl Connect for the same reason: stock levels and orders that had been handled manually now update automatically and flow into the company's ERP.
Now we're saving time, and we can use that time to focus on other aspects of the business like customer care, retail media, and logistics. — Diego Sierra, Marketplace Manager of Angel Cerdá
That reallocation matters more here than for most sellers.
Diego is blunt about the category: the perfect logistics partner for furniture does not exist. Something will inevitably arrive damaged, and the brand is judged on how fast it makes things right. Time spent on returns and customer response protects the business. Time spent rebuilding spreadsheets doesn't.
Choose the right marketplaces for your brand instead of selling everywhere
Diego said the most significant change for the business wasn't operational. It was strategic.
A year or two ago, we used to want to be on all the marketplaces we could be on, so we didn't analyze them much before joining them. Now, we know the quality of the marketplace matters, so we look at that more closely before we place our products on them. — Diego Sierra, Marketplace Manager of Angel Cerdá
Angel Cerdá makes high-quality furniture at prices to match, and learned its catalog does not perform everywhere. Before opening a channel now, the team asks whether that marketplace's audience matches its products and price point.
Monthly meetings with its Mirakl Connect account manager cover which channels are working, where to invest more, and which new marketplaces are worth pursuing.
Diego is also candid that judgment is not certainty.
Some channels the team expected to perform returned almost nothing. Others surprised them.
Diego wasn't familiar with La Redoute (opens in a new tab) when they started selling with them. But as the team worked the channel with retail media, the sponsored product ads that run inside marketplaces, sales kept climbing. He later realized it was a well-known name in France.
Today, six or seven channels drive the majority of Angel Cerdá's revenue. Diego said the smaller ones are less predictable, but still worth their place in their channel portfolio.
Marketplace sales now outpace Angel Cerdá's traditional retail channels
Marketplaces now account for roughly 70% of total sales, with peak monthly sales 6X what they were in the early days and the business growing 8% to 15% year over year.
That shift tracks a broader change in how people buy furniture, one Diego said the company saw early and moved on.
The mentality of the customer has changed a lot in the last five years. People want the convenience of using a mobile phone to shop. Someone makes a few clicks, and in a few days, they have a sofa in their living room. — Diego Sierra, Marketplace Manager of Angel Cerdá
Diego Sierra on the pieces that make marketplace selling work
The catalog gets most of the attention, and it should. But Diego's experience is that the brands who do well on marketplaces are the ones who think about everything around it, too.
You could onboard a very good catalog, the products are live, but then how do you send the orders? How do you reply to the customer? How do you make a return? You have to think about all of it. — Diego Sierra, Marketplace Manager of Angel Cerdá
The pieces he'd tell any brand to plan for:
- Logistics. Especially for large or fragile goods, where speed and care make the difference.
- Customer care. Every marketplace has its own messages to answer and its own timeline.
- Returns. A return process that's easy for the customer protects the brand.
- Pricing. Commissions, shipping and return costs all factor into the price you set.
Preparing a product catalog for AI search and agentic commerce
Angel Cerdá's next move is preparing its catalog for AI-driven discovery, so its products surface when shoppers search through AI assistants rather than storefronts.
AI is going to push us to have the catalog ready for agentic commerce, for searching by ChatGPT, Gemini and others. We want to be early to do it, not late. We think that's the future. — Diego Sierra, Marketplace Manager of Angel Cerdá
Mirakl is building new catalog attributes for agentic commerce, which Diego sees as central to that work.
Diego said his team is also investing in marketplace ads, the step he says comes after the catalog and operations are solid, and is exploring Mirakl Labs to run sponsored product campaigns.
Angel Cerdá is also applying the same experience to two new brands they're launching, in fashion and lighting, and to the UK. The company sold there successfully before Brexit ended that business, and it's now rebuilding in a market Diego says fits the brand well.
We have a lot of experience in marketplaces now, and the team's ready to make the new brands grow faster than if we started from scratch. — Diego Sierra, Marketplace Manager of Angel Cerdá
Your next customer is already shopping on a marketplace. Discover how Mirakl Connect helps manufacturers and brands expand across Europe and manage every channel from one place by contacting us (opens in a new tab).
