Mayple’s Ammar Moiz On Driving 20% More Growth By Going Global

Tune in for the challenges, trends, and payoffs that come with expanding a DTC brand internationally.

Building your business across borders? There’s never been a better time for DTC brands to go global. However, international expansion this 2023 is not without its challenges. 

In this episode, Ammar Moiz, founder and CEO at Mayple, and Adii Pienaar, co-founder and CEO at Cogsy, share what it takes to build a global brand in today’s omnichannel marketplace. They discuss:

  • How brands can maximize the organic international traffic into additional revenue
  • Why international expansion is a huge opportunity for DTC brands amidst challenges
  • The operational challenges involved in global expansion — and strategies to work around them 

Tune in on: Apple | Google | Spotify

“Every brand should be looking for more channels, more geos, just more of everything so that you can get your product in front of the consumer and be available and find every revenue opportunity.”
Ammar Moiz, founder & CEO at Mayple

Meet Ammar Moiz

Ammar Moiz is the founder and CEO of Mayple. But before that, he spent years in management consulting and private equity (where he was involved in acquiring a large global CPG brand). There, he learned what a strong international distribution looks like for consumer packaged goods (CPG).  

Using that information, he hopes to bring ideas, people, cultures, and technology together to improve people’s lives. 

Connect with Ammar on: LinkedIn 

About Mayple

Mayple helps DTC brands expand into global markets. It is a full-service logistics company that allows brands to seamlessly market, sell, fulfill, and ship products to customers worldwide without the costly upfront investment. A simple Shopify integration gives merchants access to international customers and simplifies logistics complexities for faster and low-cost shipping.

Learn more about Mayple on: Linkedin | Website

The Checkout episode 52 unpacks:

In today’s episode, Adii and Ammar explore how DTC brands can use technology and tools to expand internationally. 

Here are the highlights:

[2:36]

How Mayple fills global distribution gaps

  • Ammar had a background in management consulting before moving into private equity and then becoming a COO at Counselytics
  • Working with different brand founders, he noticed brands were scaling quickly domestically but hadn’t figured out global distribution compared to large CPG companies that have their own distribution in place
  • “What’s missing is really that distribution piece, so filling the gap that’s been filled in by us.”
[4:48]

Challenges that prevent DTC brands from scaling globally

  • The international distribution process particularly for CPG brands is not just heavily regulated but also complicated
  • The challenge to solve is how to make global distribution cheaper and faster
  • “So you can either ship for low cost or you can ship at high cost and it would get to them in under a week. So you’re battling  poor customer experience or high cost. And both of those choices are not great.”
[9:09]

20% of globalized brand's traffic is international

  • At Mayple, they’re seeing that most brands have around 15 to 20% international organic traffic hitting their website
  • “If you went to a brand and said, hey…you could just increase your revenue by 20%? I don’t know any brand that wouldn’t take that offer.
[14:18]

Expanding is as easy as turning on global shipping

  • With Mayple, merchants can turn on markets on the backend of Shopify to identify international markets
  • Mayple will also take over the supply chain to help in shipping and fulfillment globally, but merchants will get full visibility of their stocks on Shopify
  • “It takes about three to four weeks for us to get the inventory to our global distribution center in Dubai. And then from there, they can essentially turn on global shipping.”
[16:12]

Maximizing international organic traffic

  • To increase traffic, brands can set up product feed internationally and have products shown in multiple countries
  • “Brands can get mid-funnel leads for very cheap CAC and when they start turning on international marketing, there’s just a benefit on arbitrage there”
  • “There is a ROAS and customer acquisition arbitrage internationally because you can take advantage of the customers that are sitting in this funnel that are untapped, starting with the bottom of the funnel and just working your way up.”
[22:49]

How brands can safely go about international expansion

  • If you have inventory, a good question can be: how do you sell that inventory as cheap as possible?
  • Look at cheaper ways to acquire customers, especially if you have some of the capital coming in early enough to be able to fulfill wholesale orders
  • “We couldn’t be at a better time for you to be able to explore more channels and more [geographics]. I think you just have to be smart about it and figure out all of the tools that they’re on.”
[27:45]

Ammar’s 2023 outlook for consumer brands

  • 2022 was characterized by inflation but buying will pick up in 2023 because folks are thinking “this is going to be more expensive in the future”
  • Brands that have learned through the hard times in 2022 will stick through 2023 and will have to improve and level up from there
  • “Brands are going multi-channel, optimizing correctly for inventory, working capital and allocating both inventory, funds and other resources accurately. I think we’ll see more brands and I think we’ll see more disruption across large cap consumer companies.”