According to JDN, PIXmania, the fallen star of high-tech online sales, has been sold by its latest owner, Vente du diable, for an undisclosed amount. The buyer is Newpix & Co, a company recently created by Daniel Saada, a former associate sales manager at Extenso Telecom, specifically for this purpose. Vente du Diable, a subsidiary of the electronics refurbishment specialist Remade Group, had owned PIXmania for two years.
"The market for high-tech products is increasingly closed and dominated by supermarkets, a few specialised supermarkets and general e-merchants. We want to become an accessible gateway for third-party merchants who want to reach the end consumer", says Daniel Saada, the new president of PIXmania.
In practical terms, the new management team goes back to the origins of PIXmania. "We will stop selling products such as linen, garden and furniture and return to electronics in the broadest sense", says Sébastien Ouhioun, General Manager of PIXmania. Other strategic priorities include reducing the number of countries where the merchant is present from 14 to 4 (France, Spain, Portugal and Belgium), reducing the number of third-party merchants to a few hundred by the end of 2018, selecting exclusively European vendors to ensure a good quality of service, and working on exclusive offers. PIXmania now has about twenty employees.
For its part, without PIXmania, Vente du Diable is now refocusing on the sale of its own products, as they wish to have no more problems with third party vendors with insufficient quality levels. The company plans to change its name to Save. "It is the name of a network of stores dedicated to the express repair of connected objects, acquired in April 2017 by Remade and which has nearly 70 pop-up stores in France", explains Cédric Bagur, General Manager of Vente du Diable.
Created in 2000 by Steve and Jean-Emile Rosenblum, PIXmania is an e-merchant of high-tech products whose rise and fall have marked the sector. In 2010, it wanted to be a leader in online sales with 897 million euros in sales in 26 countries and nearly 1,400 employees. Caught up in a strategy of crazy diversification between site, marketplace and stores (18 in 2011), PIXmania could not resist the rise of broadline competitors such as Amazon and Cdiscount or specialised ones such as Fnac and Darty. In 2013, the German industrial group Mutares acquired PIXmania from British company Dixons Retail, which at that time was considering closing the site if there was no buyer. At the beginning of 2016, the Toulouse company Vente du Diable took over the marketplace activity of PIXmania while the site was placed in receivership.