For husband-and-wife team Arthur and Anna Policarpio, Christmas isn’t only a season of reflection and celebration. It marks the anniversary of Laudate Mariam, an online business they started back in 2018 that’s grown from sideline experiment to a massively successful eCommerce outfit on a path towards global expansion.
As the Philippines’ leading online store for personalized Catholic products, Laudate Mariam operates within a subset of the global personalized gifts market, a steadily growing sector that Market Research Future projects will surpass $38.66 billion by 2027.
The business offers personalized rosaries, necklaces, bracelets, and other products catering to the roughly 1.34 billion Catholics worldwide. “We provide gifts that are more meaningful both to the giver and to the receiver,” said Arthur Policarpio. “We’ve carved out a niche for Catholic products that are both high-quality and affordable.”
More than a business, however, Arthur Policarpio says Laudate Mariam’s growth is fueled primarily by the couple’s mission to “promote the faith, one beautiful, personalized product at a time.”
From sideline to family business
It was early December in 2018, when the Policarpios checked their daughter into the hospital. She was undergoing treatment for a rare skin disease, they said, and needed to be monitored for a few days. To cope with the stress, Anna Policarpio decided she was going to spend her time waiting by her daughter’s side, making rosaries.
“I had set up my own corner table in the hospital with my beads and paraphernalia, and every now and then, when doctors and nurses would come by to check on us, they’d stop and ask ‘ma’am are you selling those’?” Anna Policarpio said.
Her husband, Arthur Policarpio, had always been the more business-minded of the two. He had been working across digital services since 2002, staging virtual events and managing a digital marketing agency that serviced global brands like McDonald’s. Intrigued by the interest his wife’s rosaries were getting at the hospital, Arthur Policarpio felt that perhaps this could be the start of a new venture he had been itching to launch.
“I’d been telling myself that I really wanted to launch my own eCommerce startup,” Arthur Policarpio said. “I’ve helped big brands build multi-million dollar digital businesses, so why not do it for our own brand?”
Arthur Policarpio was toying with the idea of using what was then a nascent application of chatbots to automate selling products within messenger platforms. Today, that channel has evolved into conversational commerce, or c-commerce, a core pillar of nearly every social platforms’ commercial operations. After developing the then-rudimentary chatbot, the Policarpio’s store went live just in time for Christmas in 2018.
“At the onset, it was very much a startup,” Arthur Policarpio said. “My children were literally the ones answering concerns whenever customers were unable to get a proper reply from the chatbot. We had to tap our household staff to help sell. It was extremely crazy that Christmas, we just couldn’t cope with the demand. That’s when I knew there was something to this business.”
Going all-in
Between managing day-to-day operations at his digital agency, and dealing with the early days of the ongoing pandemic, Policarpio was unable to focus on Laudate Mariam for its first two years—relegating it to an intriguing, but ultimately secondary sideline. Regardless, the business only grew.
With the staggering number of inquiries coming in through their c-commerce channels, Arthur Policarpio saw that the existing chatbot technologies they were using just weren’t sophisticated enough to keep up. Out of necessity, the family operation behind Laudate Mariam spent a lot of time manually responding to many of their customers. So as the pandemic continued and consumers became more comfortable with eCommerce, the Policarpios recognized that there was an opportunity to scale even further by expanding beyond the messenger chatbots and building a new business model around more self-service channels.
This, Arthur Policarpio realized, would only be possible if they were willing to go all-in with their new startup.
“My wife and I really had to sit down and discuss, you know, maybe it’s time we professionalize this,” he said. “Maybe it’s time we make a bet on whether we—if we really put in our time here in the same way I put my time in my other companies—can really scale this business.”
The decision was made in December 2020, just in time for their seasonal spike in orders. Arthur Policarpio let go of the day-to-day operations of his digital agency and went straight to work building a new, more scalable business model for Laudate Mariam.
“At the time, we decided, okay let’s give it three months,” he said. “It’s been a year now since then and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”
One beautiful, personalized product at a time
Now on their third Christmas season as a business, Laudate Mariam employs ten people across product design, manufacturing, and distribution. In the year since Arthur Policarpio formalized the business, revenues have grown by a factor of 2.5x—with its vertical integration keeping the business highly profitable.
C-commerce still plays a critical role in their operations, the messenger chatbots directing customers towards their new website and digital storefronts on Shopee and Lazada.
In addition to their new platforms, the Policarpios also worked on honing their manufacturing process, investing in tools such as laser engraving machinery to better scale production for their personalized products.
“With Laudate, the question I asked myself was: Is it possible for a Filipino brand to produce, manufacture, distribute, and sell a physical product and develop that into a business using only digital platforms?” said Arthur Policarpio.
With a strong business model, meaningful products, and no external equity investments to date, Laudate Mariam has managed to successfully capture the local market for personalized Catholic products, and has since begun experimenting with entering new markets. Earlier this year, the Policarpios shipped an initial batch amounting to about P250,000 worth of products to the United States. They sold out within a month.
Arthur Policarpio says that by mid-2022, the team will be building on this initial test and expanding to the United States, catering to their roughly 51 million Catholics. They will also be targeting the sizable OFW communities around the world, who they believe will want a way to connect with their loved ones back home through reminders of their shared faith.
Despite the economic successes they’ve seen with Laudate Mariam, the Policarpios believe it’s this channel to share their faith that’s been their greatest accomplishment so far.
“We’re driven by a very strong mission and purpose here, which is to spread our faith,” Arthur Policarpio said. “That’s really the underlying motivation for us. We believe that in these times of difficulty through the pandemic, helping people connect to their faith will help them in all aspects of their life. And reading the reviews of our customers, we see that mission really resonates with them.”
“At its core, this business is about promoting the faith, one beautiful, personalized product at a time,” he said.