Hi Nicolas! Who are you?

Hey there! I am Nicolas Tranchant, a 37-year-old French mechanical Engineer.

Before starting my own business, in 2012 I worked in the Aeronautical Industry in France as an Industrial Engineer. However, I had to left everything to follow my Mexican wife to Mexico, where we settled down in Puerto Vallarta, on the Pacific coast.

As I had traveled before, I already knew Mexico and spoke Spanish, English, and Portuguese. Back then I had no specific skills in web, coding or marketing. In this scenario, I decided to start an e-commerce, which ended up failing.

What was Vivalatina about? Which was your business model?

The idea of Vivalatina rose when my Mexican wife moved to France to live with me, in 2010. We wanted to set up an e-Commerce to sell Mexican sterling silver jewelry that we would import from Taxco and resell in France.

I had lived a while in Mexico so I had lots of contacts in Taxco to source the jewelry. Moreover, as my wife could not work in France (her medical degree was not approved by French authorities), this was a big opportunity for her to make a living.

However, living in France we almost didn't try to turn our idea into a real product as I was very busy with my full-time job, and my wife was trying to work in the health sector while selling Mexican jewelry through eBay.

It was when we moved to Mexico in 2012, to a town with no industry and where we didn't know anyone, when I decided to give a try to this business idea we had in France and put all my efforts to succeed with it.

At these times, the idea had changed a bit. I wanted to find some local sterling silver providers and make an e-Commerce that would sell Mexican jewelry to France.

My selling argument was the low price I could offer. The plan was to run the business alone, doing it all by myself: finding providers, taking pictures, managing the web, and marketing the site. I wanted to cut costs and offer really good prices, as this was my main advantage.

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Which technologies did you use to build it?

In the beginning, I tried to code the e-Commerce site using the OScommerce platform but it was a heck. Too much code to learn and write.

Suddenly, someone hacked my website, so I gave it up and looked for an easier solution. That’s when I found Shopify and decided to give it a try. I completely loved it!

With Shopify, I could get my hands off the code and spend more time designing the shop appearance, editing product images and doing web marketing. However, I still wanted to manage the design and template of the e-Commerce. It ended up being a pure loss of time with really bad results.