Four founders started Hawkers in Elche in 2013 with no background in eyewear. Álex Moreno, Iñaki Soriano, Pablo Sánchez and David Moreno began by reselling Knockaround sunglasses from the United States before they put their own name on a frame, according to Modaes.
Nine years later the company handed its top job to an executive who had spent more than a decade inside the optical trade. Alejandro Betancourt López, the brand’s chairman, has described that sequence as a recipe: let newcomers find the opening, then bring in people who know the business from the inside.
What the Hawkers Founders Brought
Their advantage was reach. The four partners learned to sell through cheap social media ads at a moment when those ads cost very little, and the approach scaled quickly. TechCrunch counted 3.5 million pairs sold by October 2016, three years after launch.
Timing helped as much as talent. Paid digital media “was very inexpensive at the time,” Alejandro Betancourt recalled, and sunglasses suited online sales because it was “very easy to sell something that is one size, one type of sunglasses, and it’s cheap enough for you to take a chance.” Dresses, he noted, were far harder to sell over the internet.
Asked in a 2023 conversation what outsiders bring to an industry, he said the Hawkers team “thought outside the box and they found an amazing formula for successful conversion and marketing.” He then offered a far less glamorous example, a company that enters the toilet paper market, finds something “disruptive” and starts “creating market share” with no paper-goods veterans on staff. The case he had in mind, he said later in the call, was Renova, the Portuguese maker of colored toilet paper.
Where Alejandro Betancourt López Adds the Experts
Fresh thinking gets a company in the door, and staying there takes a different skill set, in the view of Alejandro Betancourt López. “The best complement then is to bring the people that are expert in that industry,” he said, so they can adapt the product to professional specifications and make it better. Combining the two groups, he added, is what produces “a winning formula.”
Hawkers, chaired by Alejandro Betancourt López, followed that order. In October 2022 it named Pedro Beneyto chief executive, replacing Nacho Puig. Beneyto had worked for more than 12 years as chief financial officer of Alain Afflelou in Spain, part of the French optical retail chain, and Modaes reported that he was hired to lead the brand’s expansion.
Research on startup outcomes supports the pairing. An NBER study of high-growth entrepreneurship found that founders with at least three years of prior work in their startup’s specific industry were roughly twice as likely to build a company in the top tier of growth.