Hawkers started with €300. Four university friends in Elche, Spain scraped together the amount in 2013, bought a batch of sunglasses from an American brand called Knockaround, and sold them on Facebook. Within a year they’d built a social media following and were processing orders faster than their improvised supply chain could handle.
By the time Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López arrived in 2016, Hawkers had traction but needed infrastructure. He led a €50 million Series A round, at the time one of the largest startup financing rounds in Spain, and took the presidency of the company in November of that year. What followed was a systematic dismantling of how sunglasses had historically been sold.
The established model for premium and mid-market eyewear ran through retail: department stores, optical chains, branded boutiques. Margins were compressed at each step, brand messaging was diluted by proximity to competitors, and customer data belonged to the retailer rather than the manufacturer. Betancourt López saw the direct-to-consumer model as a way to solve all three problems simultaneously.
“It was cool, it was fresh, and we were doing something different than anybody else at the time, which is online social, or social media marketing,” he said. “And that approach totally disrupted the market in the way we penetrated the market. And I think that that innovation has built a huge brand that is today Hawkers.”
The execution relied heavily on data. Rather than spending on traditional advertising, Betancourt López’s team ran targeted campaigns across Instagram and Facebook, analyzing engagement rates, conversion figures, and customer behavior to refine messaging in near-real time. Influencer partnerships extended reach without requiring the kind of brand deal spending that large legacy competitors used. The audience Hawkers reached was younger, more digitally native, and more likely to share purchases organically.
Annual sales crossed €100 million under his leadership. The brand expanded to more than fifty countries. Physical stores followed in key markets, with over sixty international locations opening in a compressed period, eventually including planned expansion into Mexico where the company intends to add optical services alongside retail. By most measures, Hawkers grew into the third-largest sunglasses company in the world by volume.
What made the growth durable was the data infrastructure built underneath it. Betancourt López’s approach to analytics gave Hawkers the ability to test new products quickly, identify underperforming markets early, and adjust campaign spending without the lag time that characterizes traditional retail planning cycles. Decisions that would have taken quarters inside a conventional fashion company were made in weeks.
The environmental dimension came later but fit the same commercial logic. Hawkers launched its H2O collection using plastic recovered directly from ocean waters, positioning sustainability as a brand asset rather than a cost. Betancourt López’s position has been that younger consumers want to understand how the products they buy interact with the environment, and that meeting that expectation builds loyalty rather than eroding margin. The global sunglasses market is projected to grow from $39.9 billion in 2024 to $58.8 billion by 2033, with sustainability increasingly cited as a differentiator driving purchasing decisions.
The Hawkers story is often told as a digital marketing case study, which it is. But the underlying investment thesis was about something more structural. Betancourt López bet that the internet would disaggregate the distribution advantages that legacy eyewear brands had built over decades through retail relationships, and that a brand starting from zero could compete with Luxottica and Safilo if it owned the customer relationship directly. His full portfolio through O’Hara Administration reflects the same instinct applied across sectors: find where the distribution structure is about to break, and get in before it does. His approach to building leadership teams inside those companies is documented separately, as is his broader business biography and his investment thinking. His public-facing profile covers the arc from energy to consumer brands to technology. The €300 origin story is compelling. The €50 million bet on what the internet would do to fashion retail is the more instructive one.