Mirabesque: A Year Later

“We actually exceeded our target for the month!” Victoria Seibert’s voice gave her excitement away. Being the co-founder of a young e-commerce startup is certainly not an easy task. And neither does pursuing a full-time Master’s program at one of Germany’s top universities simultaneously make it any easier. The young entrepreneur, Victoria Seibert, however, still somehow manages to do it all. This February we reached out to Victoria to have a chat about how things were going for her brand, Mirabesque, as a year rolls by since it won the prestigious 2018 MCEI Seed Award.

Mirabesque had set out with a vision to offer dancers a unique platform where all their needs for dancewear and dance accessories would be met. The business had its roots in trying to solve a problem that many dancers and dance enthusiasts had been facing for a long time: finding the right dance attire and the right accessories to pair it with. Because of this, Victoria, a dancer herself, found herself ending up creating a unique brand called Mirabesque.

Since its early days though, much has happened around Mirabesque. For one, Victoria, a team player, found the business partner she had been looking for for quite some time. Jürgen Dorner, Co-founder and Managing Director of Mirabesque, met Victoria online through a platform for entrepreneurs and the two immediately hit it off with their shared vision and complementary skills. While Victoria has a keen sense of the dancewear market and a high degree of product knowledge, Jürgen leads the technological aspects of the business. In fact, one of their first projects together was setting up the online shop for Mirabesque in September 2018, which became a success in only a few months, even enabling revenues to now exceed planned targets. The Mirabesque team also has its own fully-equipped office now, thanks to the coveted MCEI funding. Victoria stressed how the funding helped give the Mirabesque team a head-start to achieving these milestones that would otherwise have taken a much longer time.

The company had since also established itself into Mirabesque GmbH and has now started hiring part-time employees and freelancers depending on the seasonality of sales due to the growing demand for their products. Moreover, the team had revamped the whole business model together and optimized the selling processes for better efficiency. This enabled them to transition from a company that initially started with selling only 50 products to one that sells about 600 different products. More and more different kinds of items are being added to their collection every day and the team now envisions to grow this number to about 5000 by the end of this year. One of their biggest successes during this time was also setting up their sourcing of products and establishing a process of testing products and using the frequency of returns to reassess their portfolio continuously.

Although at its inception, the focus for Mirabesque was to both manufacture as well as sell imported dancewear, the team was able to quickly realize its difficulty and reevaluate their vision. The brand now focuses on offering a carefully curated portfolio of dancewear where there is something for every dancer, a stark contrast to what the more niche-focused competitors of Mirabesque are offering.

Mirabesque’s goal now is to become the brand of choice for customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland through continuously increasing their product portfolio to include more interesting, exotic and high quality dancewear. Scaling the business to be able to offer their products to other parts of Europe is also something the team envisions for the long run. Their biggest focus now is reducing delivery times alongside appropriately managing inventories and return rates. Because the team decided to venture, follow its dream and take on some calculated risks, 2018 had seen Mirabesque achieve quite a few major milestones that would enable the business grow from a small store that was selling only a few products to a unique brand that Victoria and Jürgen have together created. “Start young,” says Victoria enthusiastically as an ending note for students dreaming of creating something of their own, “because there is just more time when you’re young.”