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Alykhan Karim
CEO at Sonoma Market
Alykhan Karim is the CEO and co-founder of Sonoma Market, a top specialized food and beverage marketplace in Latin America, offering financial services to partner Sellers.
Before Sonoma Market, Alykhan founded Sonoma Wines, a renowned wine e-commerce platform, and was part of the founding team at Oppa, a leading Brazilian design-furniture e-retailer.
With a strong background in managing teams and operations, Alykhan has led teams of up to 100 employees across various departments.
Alykhan Karim, originally from California, has spent over a decade operating in Latin America and is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese.
He holds a dual Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University and has pursued additional studies in international relations, political economy, and sommelier certification.
Highlights
Endeavor has always been an organization that I've admired.
They've been in Brazil for 20 years, long before it was "hot" to be in Latam. They were responsible for the creation of the word entrepreneurship (empreendedorismo) in the portuguese language. (Crazy that this didn't exist until 2008!)
Today I am proud and excited to announce that Sonoma Market was selected to be an Endeavor Scale Up company.
We're excited to have Julia Franco, Guilherme Camargo and the awesome organization that is Endeavor with us as partners on our journey as we bring the quality food and beverage sector of Latin America online!
#entrepreneurship #foodandbeverage #brazil #latinamerica #empreendedorismo #endeavor #scaleup
Much of our hypothesis at Sonoma Market has been around the power of the long tail.
It's what drives a well thought out SEO strategy today. It's what's made Shopify a business. And it will be one of the primary advantages of specialized marketplaces globally: offering a well thought out "vertical" solution for a previously unattended group of constituents, oftentimes small and medium enterprises, who aren't finding traction on big "horizontal" platforms: the Amazons, Ebays and MercadoLivre's of the world.
Our work has been around the long tail of the quality food and beverage economy. Today I looked at our 2021 Seller data and survey and felt pretty excited.
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80% of Sonoma Market GMV last year came from 47 different SME's
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The Sonoma Market platform was the primary source of revenue for 6 different small companies
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4 companies sold $50k USD in a single month for the very first time
It's exciting to help farmers, winegrowers, new sustainable food brands and specialized retailers tell their stories. I liked this photo from Pomerode, one of the best new cheese producers in Brazil, in the mountains of Santa Catarina state. We work with them through their local emporium partners in São Paulo. They're rad producers, we're excited to offer their brand to our customers!
