Neck&Neck

When the Zamacolas family bought Neck & Neck, there were already some stores in Switzerland, Portugal and kuwait, and they decided to cancelled the contracts in that countries becauseof several problems.

After to hire a specialised Franchising Consultancy to generate the strategic internationalisation project, they decided grow slowly by themselves. (theconsultancy was too ambitious, for a consolidation stage).

MARKET RESEARCH (make a selection of the new countries).
2003 - The expansion department of Neck child S.A. made a planning ofan internationalisation expansion in order to open own stores. ( At the beginning they prefered open their own stores instead of opening franchises because they wanted to developtheir business slowly. Franchisees, always want to get profit quickly).
Tried to systematize the election of new countries (Markets preselection). Taking into account factors as,
1.Socioeconomic characteristics (number of cities with more than 70,000 inhabitants, standards of living, percentage of children, etc).
2.Identify those countries where big multinationalhad presence. (Jacadi, Catiminis) and where spanish companies had opened stores with similar public, like Imaginarium or Massimodutti).
3.Among 50 countries selected, they chosencountries where the culture is similar to spanish culture.
4.Among 30 remaining countries, they made a deeply analysed based on:

•exchange risk
•customs
•kind of competence
•retailimplementation

5. Finally they choose the most similar city to the classical Neck & Neck style.

6. But the most important point in order to choose a good market forthe company after the statistics (they had) it was that they finally decided the market by intuition. The company was guided by good vibrations felt toward the country chosen.