Hawkers by the Numbers Under Alejandro Betancourt López
Hawkers closed 2023 with €55 million in revenue, 17% more than the €47 million it booked a year earlier. The Elche eyewear company runs 70 stores of its own, sells online into more than 50 countries and opened its first franchise in Mexico that December.
Alejandro Betancourt López chairs Saldum Ventures, the holding through which Hawkers operates. Modaes describes the eyewear maker as a company he controls, with a medium-term plan to nearly double its sales.
Where the Revenue Comes From
Online sales made up 44% of the 2023 total. Company-owned stores, mostly in Spain, Portugal and Italy, delivered 34%, and wholesale to other retailers added 22%. Chief Executive Pedro Beneyto told Modaes the 2024 goal was growth in every channel, with retail taking a bigger slice.
Beneyto also said Hawkers reached positive EBITDA in 2023 and expected about €65 million in revenue for 2024. Counting marketplaces, online channels were running near 65% of sales by mid-2024, a measure that folds third-party sites into the digital total.
A technical range tied to motorcycle racer Álex Márquez joined the catalog in 2024, and the company planned warehouses in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Greece to cut delivery times across Europe.
The Store Count Behind Alejandro Betancourt López’s Plan
Seventy-five new points of sale were on the 2024 list, most of them in Mexico and Spain. Hawkers budgeted €20 million of investment for the year, all of it from its own funds, and set a medium-term target of €100 million in revenue for 2026 or 2027. Reaching that figure would take about 54% more revenue than the €65 million forecast for 2024.
Company stores are a narrower count inside that figure. By May 2024 Beneyto was describing about 20 company store openings for the year, most of them in the second half and many in Mexico. About 500 people work across the business, from the Elche headquarters to offices in Madrid and Mexico City.
“We’re leaders in Europe. We want to enter with more investment in the U.S.,” Alejandro Betancourt told an interviewer in 2023, naming Latin America and Southeast Asia as further targets. The U.S. push, he said, depended on finding the right entry point and the marketing tools to make growth there efficient. Alejandro Betancourt López set the growth bar at more than 40% a year. “Right now we’re growing about 25% year over year, and we want to double that,” he said.
A €50 million round in 2016 was led by the founders of the Spanish social network Tuenti and by O’Hara Financial, the vehicle linked to Alejandro Betancourt López, who later took control of the company.\