How Alejandro Betancourt López Rebuilt Hawkers When the Old Model Broke

By 2016, the playbook for selling things online looked deceptively simple. Find a product with fat margins, buy cheap Facebook ads, target the right demographic, and watch the orders roll in. For a while, it worked. Hawkers, a sunglasses brand born in Elche, Spain, had been doing exactly that since 2013. The company sold polarised lenses at €20–25 a pair, well under the €100-plus that legacy eyewear brands charged. Hawkers gave away more than 30,000 free pairs to build brand awareness, ran aggressive social campaigns, and at one point was spending roughly €1 per sale on Facebook advertising. That ratio was extraordinary, almost absurdly profitable, and it attracted serious attention from investors who could see how the maths scaled.

One of those investors was Alejandro Betancourt López, who put €50 million into Hawkers in 2016, acquired approximately 25% of the company, and assumed the presidency. The bet was clear enough: here was a brand with proven consumer demand, a digital-first model, and room to scale internationally. What wasn’t obvious at the time was how quickly the economics of that model would shift, and how much the company would need to change to survive what came next. The story of Hawkers over the following years is really a story about adaptation. It’s about what happens when a business built on one advantage has to find several new ones.

When the Ad Arbitrage Disappeared

The golden era of cheap social media advertising didn’t last. As more brands piled onto Facebook and Instagram, all bidding for the same eyeballs, costs climbed. Hawkers wasn’t the only company affected; the entire direct-to-consumer sector felt the squeeze. But for a brand that had built its identity around low prices and high-volume digital sales, the pain was acute. The margin between what it cost to reach a customer and what that customer spent was being narrowed fast, and no amount of creative optimisation could reverse a market-wide trend.

Betancourt López has been blunt about this. As he put it: “Everybody’s doing the same thing, price goes through the roof, and the big winners are the social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, they’re making the money right now. The margins are shifted in the chain of value, to somewhere else.” That “somewhere else” was the platforms themselves, and it left brands like Hawkers holding a shrinking share of the economics they’d once dominated. The value chain had reorganised itself, and the companies that built audiences on rented land were the ones paying the price.

The response couldn’t be incremental. Tweaking ad spend or testing new creative formats wouldn’t fix a structural problem. The entire distribution model needed rethinking, and the leadership team knew it. What followed was a multi-year transformation that would change nearly every aspect of how Hawkers operated.

From Screen to Street

The pivot toward physical retail acknowledged a basic truth: a single-channel business is a fragile one, especially when that channel’s pricing is controlled by someone else entirely. Under Betancourt López’s leadership, Hawkers began opening its own stores, primarily across Spain and Portugal. At peak, the network exceeded 80 locations, with around 65 to 67 currently in operation. Each store represented a bet that sunglasses, an inherently tactile product, would sell better when customers could pick them up, try them on, and walk out wearing them.

Retail gave Hawkers something Facebook never could: a fixed, predictable cost of customer acquisition. Once a lease is signed and a shop is fitted out, the cost of reaching each walk-in customer doesn’t fluctuate with algorithmic whims. There are no auction dynamics, no sudden spike in CPMs, no platform policy changes that crater reach overnight. Sunglasses are personal. Customers want to see how a frame sits on their face, how the colour works with their skin tone, whether the weight feels right on the bridge of their nose. That friction can’t be replicated on a screen.

The shift also opened new revenue psychology. A shopper browsing a Hawkers store in Madrid or Lisbon is already in buying mode, already physically present, already handling the product. Conversion rates in well-located retail tend to be substantially higher than on e-commerce sites, where abandoned carts are the norm and comparison shopping is one tab away. The real question was whether Hawkers could pull off the transition without losing the lean, fast-moving identity that had made it interesting in the first place, and whether the unit economics of physical stores could replace the margins that digital had lost.

Mexico and the Checo Effect

The European retail rollout was well underway by this point. But across the Atlantic, something unexpected had taken shape. Mexico was becoming Hawkers’ largest international market, eventually accounting for 35 to 40% of total sales. The catalyst was a sponsorship deal with Sergio “Checo” Pérez, the Mexican Formula 1 driver, whose enormous domestic following gave Hawkers a visibility boost that no amount of paid social media could replicate. It was the kind of organic amplification that brands spend years trying to engineer.

The Pérez partnership was a lesson in cultural reach. F1 fandom in Mexico is intense, passionate, and deeply loyal. By associating with Checo, Hawkers tapped into a pre-existing emotional community rather than trying to build one from scratch. The brand didn’t need to explain itself to Mexican consumers; the endorsement did the explaining. And because Hawkers’ price point sat well below luxury competitors, the audience could actually afford to buy what was being advertised. That’s a detail luxury sponsorships often overlook. There is little point in generating desire for a product that sits outside your target customer’s budget.

The Mexican expansion has since moved beyond marketing into permanent infrastructure. Hawkers introduced a franchise model in the country and partnered with developer Gicsa to open around 10 stores. The ambition is clear: Mexico is projected to surpass Spain as the brand’s largest market overall. That trajectory says something important about where Hawkers sees its future, and it isn’t solely on the Iberian Peninsula. The franchise approach also represents a lower-risk method of international expansion. Local operators absorb some of the capital and operational burden, and Hawkers retains control of the brand and product.

Building the Factory

COVID-19 exposed a vulnerability that many consumer brands had quietly accepted for years: deep dependence on distant supply chains. When shipping lanes clogged and factory floors in Asia went dark, Hawkers found itself unable to fulfil orders reliably. The problem wasn’t created by the pandemic; it was revealed with brutal clarity. And for Alejandro Betancourt López, the lesson was unambiguous. The company needed to control its own production.

The decision to build an in-house factory came in early 2021. Rather than opting for a low-cost setup, Hawkers invested in high-end Italian injection moulding machinery, with individual moulds costing up to €80,000 each. Comparable Chinese moulds run at roughly $10,000. The price difference reflects a fundamentally different approach to manufacturing. The Italian moulds are polished to a degree that allows the finished frames to emerge with smooth, glossy surfaces that require no painting or additional finishing. That means fewer chemicals, fewer production steps, fewer quality control failures, and a cleaner environmental footprint overall.

The factory also introduced a closed-loop element to Hawkers’ production process. Defective raw materials and off-spec batches are recycled back into the manufacturing process rather than discarded. It’s not a zero-waste system, and the company hasn’t claimed it to be one, but it’s a considerable step away from the disposable economics that dominate fast fashion and its accessories. The environmental argument matters, but so does the financial one: reducing waste reduces cost, and controlling production means controlling quality, timelines, and margins simultaneously. For a company that had already lost control of its customer acquisition costs, gaining control of its manufacturing costs was a logical counterbalance.

The Leadership Question

Scaling from a scrappy online brand to a vertically integrated, multi-channel, multi-country operation requires a different kind of management. The founders who are brilliant at building a social media following aren’t always the same people who can negotiate lease terms across two continents, manage factory throughput, or structure franchise agreements. Betancourt López brought in Pedro Beneyto as CEO. That hire signalled the company’s ambitions clearly. Beneyto’s background at Alain Afflelou, one of Europe’s largest optical retail chains, gave him direct experience with multi-store operations, franchise structures, and the particular logistics of selling eyewear at scale.

The appointment reflected a broader pattern in Hawkers’ evolution under Betancourt López’s presidency. Each phase of the company’s growth has required different capabilities: digital marketing expertise in the early years, retail operations knowledge during the store expansion, manufacturing experience for the factory build, and franchise management skills for the international push. The Saldum Ventures group structure, under which Hawkers operates, provided a framework for bringing in specialists without losing the overall direction of the business.

Hawkers grew 17% in 2023 and laid plans for 75 store openings in 2024. Those aren’t the numbers of a company in decline or a brand coasting on past momentum. They suggest a business that has found a model capable of compounding, one where stores, e-commerce, owned manufacturing, and international franchising reinforce one another rather than competing for resources. The growth also validates the thesis that physical retail and digital sales can be complementary rather than substitutional, provided the economics are managed carefully.

What the Downturn Actually Taught

There’s a particular kind of business wisdom that only comes from watching your core advantage evaporate. Hawkers’ original edge was cheap customer acquisition through social media. When that edge dulled, the company could have done what many DTC brands did: raise prices, chase profitability through cost-cutting, or sell to a larger conglomerate and let someone else worry about the future. Instead, it rebuilt the business around assets it could own and control. Stores. A factory. International franchise agreements.

Alejandro Betancourt López has spoken about this tension directly. “Sustainability and profitability are two different things,” he has said. “If profitable tomorrow, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be profitable forever.” That distinction matters more than it might seem at first glance. Plenty of businesses are profitable in any given quarter. Fewer are built to remain so when their market shifts beneath them. The Hawkers story is, at its core, about recognising that a business model’s expiry date can arrive well before the product’s appeal fades.

He has also been candid about the relentlessness the category demands. “You have to convince everybody, all the market, to buy a pair of sunglasses every day and put a lot of marketing and wake up the next day and do the same all over and all over and all over.” Sunglasses aren’t a subscription product. There’s no recurring revenue, no automatic renewal, no lock-in. Every sale has to be earned fresh, which makes the underlying infrastructure, the stores, the factory, the franchise network, all the more important. They’re what allow Hawkers to keep earning those sales efficiently, even as the cost of digital attention continues to climb year after year.

The company’s trajectory from 2013 to now reads less like a linear growth story and more like a series of forced adaptations, each one making the business slightly more resilient and slightly harder to replicate. Whether Hawkers becomes a billion-euro brand or settles into a durable mid-market position, the decisions made during the downturn years, when the old model broke and a new one had to be assembled piece by piece, will have been the ones that mattered most.