How Alejandro Betancourt López’s Hawkers Defied Fashion’s Valuation Problem

Wall Street loves technology companies. Software firms routinely command valuations of 10, 15, even 20 times their annual revenue. The logic seems straightforward: once built, software can scale infinitely with minimal marginal cost, and customers tend to stick around year after year through subscriptions and integrations. Fashion companies face a different reality entirely.

Alejandro Betancourt López, president of Spanish eyewear brand Hawkers, has spent nearly a decade wrestling with the financial dynamics that make consumer fashion one of the most challenging sectors for investors. His conclusion is blunt: fashion demands relentless effort just to stay in place, and markets price that difficulty into valuations. “Hardest one is fashion,” Betancourt López said. “Fashion brands are valued at very low multiple levels because you don’t know for how long they’re going to be sustainable.”

The Sustainability Problem No One Talks About

When Alejandro Betancourt López discusses sustainability, he isn’t referring to environmental practices or ethical sourcing. He means something more fundamental: whether a brand can maintain its relevance and revenue over time. This distinction matters because profitability and sustainability operate on different timescales—and fashion struggles with both.

“Sustainability and profitability are two different things,” Betancourt López explained. “If profitable tomorrow, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to be profitable forever. I think profitability is tough, but is something easier to achieve than sustainability, because in any industry, it’s very hard to predict where the market is shifting.”

Recent data confirms this assessment. According to industry analysis, fashion and apparel companies trade at median EBITDA multiples of roughly 9-10x, while high-growth software companies often command multiples several times higher. The gap reflects investor skepticism about fashion’s long-term predictability.

The problem intensifies for brands selling discretionary items like sunglasses. Unlike software subscriptions that auto-renew or consumer staples that people purchase habitually, fashion products require active persuasion with every transaction. Alejandro Betancourt López describes the grind in stark terms.

“You have to convince everybody, all the market, everybody in the market, to buy a pair of sunglasses every day and put a lot of marketing and wake up the next day and do the same all over and all over and all over,” he said. “So it’s a very, very, very hard sustainable company to keep it sustainable over time.”

Reinvention as a Business Model

Hawkers launched in 2013 when four Spanish entrepreneurs pooled roughly $300 to sell sunglasses online. The company caught fire through aggressive Facebook advertising during an era when digital ad costs remained low, scaling from that modest start to €70 million in annual revenue by 2016. That October, Hawkers raised €50 million in its first external financing round, and the following month appointed Alejandro Betancourt López as president.

The honeymoon didn’t last. As competitors flooded digital advertising channels, the cost of acquiring customers through Facebook and Instagram skyrocketed. The arbitrage that had fueled Hawkers’ early growth disappeared. What worked brilliantly in 2014 became economically unviable by 2018.

Betancourt López recognized that survival required perpetual adaptation. “You have to use all the tools you have in marketing, creativity, reinvent yourself constantly,” he said. “It’s a matter of being able to adapt constantly or in the long term or in the medium term.”

Under his leadership, Hawkers pivoted from a purely digital operation to an omnichannel retailer. The company opened physical stores across Spain and Portugal—approximately 70 locations by 2023—and launched wholesale distribution in over 30 markets. Mexico became particularly important, growing to represent 35-40% of total sales, partly through sponsorship deals with Formula 1 drivers.

The transformation required more than new sales channels. Hawkers also brought manufacturing in-house, building its own production facility starting in early 2021 to reduce dependence on Chinese suppliers and improve quality control. The company invested in high-end Italian machinery for injection molding—equipment costing up to €80,000 per mold compared to roughly $10,000 for Chinese alternatives.

The Price Sensitivity Trap

Fashion brands face another challenge that technology companies largely avoid: customers notice price increases immediately and often refuse to pay them. Alejandro Betancourt López has watched this dynamic play out during economic downturns.

“The elasticity of pricing, it’s something that consumers, when it’s a downturn economy, sometimes they lose money just not to lose market share, and that’s to achieve sustainability in the future,” he explained. “But at the same time, you’re eating your insides out and you don’t know how long you’re going to be able to sustain that.”

This creates a brutal equilibrium. Raise prices too aggressively, and customers defect to competitors. Hold prices steady during inflationary periods, and margins compress. Neither path leads anywhere comfortable.

“The equilibrium is very hard and very difficult,” Betancourt López acknowledged.

Competing When Everyone Copies Your Playbook

The digital marketing tactics that propelled Hawkers’ rise have become industry standard. Every eyewear startup now runs Instagram campaigns and partners with influencers. The playbook that once provided differentiation now serves as table stakes.

Alejandro Betancourt López watched the margin shift in real time. “Now it gets tougher. Sustainability, now prices, everybody’s doing the same thing. So everybody goes to do the same thing, price goes through the roof, and the big winners are the social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, they’re making the money right now,” he said. “The margins are shifted in the chain of value, to somewhere else.”

This observation echoes a pattern Betancourt López has studied across industries. Value migrates along supply chains over time, concentrating in whichever segment holds the most leverage. For decades, fashion brands captured healthy margins by controlling distribution and cultivating brand mystique. Digital platforms have disrupted that model, inserting themselves between brands and customers while extracting tolls for access.

Hawkers responded by reducing its dependence on paid digital advertising. “You have to reinvent yourself, create and evolve into a different kind of company that doesn’t depend on social media or paid media marketing,” Betancourt López explained. The company’s expansion into physical retail, wholesale partnerships, and owned manufacturing all serve this goal—building assets and relationships that competitors cannot easily replicate.

Staying Above Water

Fashion’s combination of fickle consumer preferences, low switching costs, and intense competition creates a sector where few brands endure. Alejandro Betancourt López frames the challenge with characteristic directness.

“Nobody has a perfect upper line. People do get downturns and then get up and do better, or people don’t get up and do better. It’s really, really, really hard,” he said. “It’s a very competitive market, and sustainability is something that you have to be on top of your game all the time to make sure in any industry, that your head is above water.”

Hawkers has managed to keep its head above water longer than most. The company now operates in more than 50 countries, employs over 500 people, and generates approximately $100 million in annual sales. Those numbers represent genuine achievement in a sector littered with failed brands and broken promises.

Whether Hawkers can sustain that performance for another decade remains uncertain—Betancourt López would be the first to acknowledge as much. Fashion offers no guarantees, only the opportunity to compete again tomorrow.