Online Shop

Last week our online shop modes4u turned four and we started a big giveaway to celebrate our birthday. When we were preparing our birthday activities, we also wrote a little article about our shop and looked back on how everything started and developed in the last years. We thought it might be nice to share that with you, if you are interested in some funny facts and background information. And don’t forget to join our giveaway by leaving a comment on our blog post 4 years modes4u: BIG Happy Birthday Giveaway. The giveaway is still open till April 3rd.

From 1 to 100 – the kawaii online shop modes4u celebrates its 4th birthday

1640 days ago the online shop modes4u.com opened its virtual doors. Since then the team around native Austrian and company founder Sandra Boch has been sending cute and playful stationery, fabrics and accessories to more than 25,000 customers worldwide. What started with one order per week is now at around 100 per day, and modes4u celebrates its 4th birthday.

Enthusiasm, ambition and maybe a dozen products, that’s what it began with. “We received the first order in our shop around 3 weeks after we went online. It came from Germany and I was so happy that we finally got one“, 30 year old company founder Sandra Boch remembers. Even 4 years after her business opening the young entrepreneur is still excited about every order. But by now she gets a lot more. Today the modes4u-team processes an average of 100 orders per day, in the busy pre-Christmas weeks they even receive several hundred every day. “That’s when really everybody has to help, so that we can handle that amount”, Sandra says.

The Native Austrian, who emigrated to Hong Kong many years ago, established the online shop for cute stationery, fabrics, accessories and DIY-items in 2007 with her Chinese husband Alan Mak. On March 20th 2008 they launched the website www.modes4u.com. “In the first months we maybe had one order per week; we stored the products in our flat and took pictures of them in our bedroom”, IT manager Alan remembers. Today the couple employs 6 German and Chinese staff members, developed its own storage and packing system and has a professional photo studio. The company just moved into a new office last year, but will change location again in 2012: They are just running out of space.

Almost 3,500 products start their journey from the office in Hong Kong to customers all over the world. Already 86 different countries received packages from modes4u. “But most of our orders are shipped to Germany, France and the UK. Many customers are from the USA too. A lot of our products, which we mainly import from Japan, are just really hard to get in those countries”, Sandra explains the success of her own company.

Win one of our cute San-X packages in our big birthday giveaway