Skili

Rental & leasing of sport- and recreation articles and rental and lease of textile, clothing, jewelry and footwear.

private limited liability company

Belgium

https://www.skili.be/

Better for the environment than ordinary clothing stores, multiple people make use of an item.

Lothar De Keyne, co-founder and CEO of Skili

Yoshi Janssens

Lothar De Keyne, Maxime Ossieur and Maxime De Vos.

Quality is slowly disappearing in the commercial world of now. Skili wants to do something about this. They are going back to the essence: “What do I need?”.

The base is to build something nice to make a big change in the world. Don’t waste money, time and space on specific accessories to ski or snowboard. You can only do it a couple of months a year. This is where Skili makes the difference. Skili rents and leases Ski- and snowboard clothing and –material to people who go with their philosophy “Pay for your adventure, not for your material”. (Skili, 2016) In the summer of 2016 Skili will start with another concept. They will rent and lease tents and camping materials.

Summary

Background

From his boyhood onwards, Lothar was already entrepreneurial minded. He had a lot of energy and did a lot of projects. His dream was to solve problems in the world. He didn’t think about this being entrepreneurship, he had no clue.

They founded Skili because they were looking for a perfect service model with specific features. The first one was that it had to be an expensive product. The second one was that the product was being used inefficient. The third and last feature was that it had to be quickly changing. With these 3 features and a confluence of events, they started a service of renting and leasing ski clothing and -accessories.

Skili was founded and financed with their own savings. Each financed €5000. There is one win-win loan at the moment and the shares are fully in their possession.

Mission

Alter the way of financing expensive goods, you don’t have to feel obligated to buy.

Vision

Use qualitative goods instead of owning it.

Values

The frustrations in the retail industry were the reason of existence. Not the possession, but the experience is the core of Skili. Sustainability through renting and not selling.

Business Model

The Skili team started with a completely new business model. Lothar started an idea and took a partner (Maxime Ossieur) who helped developing. He is mainly active in the logistic part. After half a year they hired Maxime De Vos who is responsible for the IT and the graphic design.

Skili rents and leases ski clothing and accessories. Meaning that they have 2 main activities: rental and sales after rental. Skili makes money through service fees. They buy the materials one time and lend it out multiple times. There’s also an option to buy the materials after rental, if these aren’t promised for rent in the future. At the moment there is no stock that is fully decrepit or at the end of its lifetime.

Organizations that helped Skili to get going were HoGent with market research, Unizo for the draft of the financial plan and businessplan. Office space from Iminds, Ghentrepreneur were they could follow workshops and a board of advice with mentors (expert in the sector).

Making people familiar with the concept was the hardest part. They are not only B2C oriented, in the beginning they were B2B oriented. It was a lot of talking with organizations and companies. They started with school who were going on ski-excursions, then social media, radio, tv, etc. People’s familiarity with Skili knew some ups and downs.

Growth

Since September 2014 Skili is doubles in size per year. In Flanders they are growing faster than other regions.

Customers

Skili focuses on two segments: on the one hand you have the students, from kindergarten to university. On the other hand you have the young families.

Competitors

Main competitors for Skili are Decathlon and AS Adventure which sell ski clothing and accessories. It’s not totally the same, because they sell and Skili rents and leases but the experience direct competition from these companies because people often still opt for the traditional ‘buying of goods’.

An indirect competitor is Conculega in the USA. Skili is not yet operating in this market.

Conclusion

An opportunity for Skili is that they use a businessmodel where a lot of other products would fit in, so they have a lot of space to grow. Look at their newest concept to rent and lease camping materials and tents. A treat for Skili is a bigger party with a better distribution network who takes over their place. A weakness of Skili is that they have to change the consumer behavior from ‘possession’ to ‘use’ and this takes time of course.

The biggest obstacle Skili had was keeping focus. In the beginning you want to try and do a lot of things. But you have to try a little bit and then choose a focus.

The most important things Lothar learned was that you have to be realistic. At the start, a startup is very dreamy. But an idea isn’t worth anything, your actions become of value. You have to take action in every moment.

Some tips Lothar has for other starting colleague-entrepreneurs is dare fail. If you don’t dare to do, you will come to the conclusion that without doing nothing is going to happen.

This year they want to have a summer season, whereas previous years they were highly reliable of a good winter season. Next winter they want to introduce themselves in the Netherlands and after this they want to scale and grow stronger in Belgium. In a couple of years Lothar wants to make Skili a fully European company.

Posted on 11/04/2016