Aslı Gökdere, The Founder of Evmanya

Aslı Gökdere was born in İzmir. She completed her undergraduate education at Bilgi University, Department of International Relations. After her undergraduate diploma, she did her master's degree in Business Administration at Bilgi University. Gökdere continued her academic life at the University of California, Irvinde, where she graduated from the Digital Marketing program.

In 2005, Aslı Gökdere started her career at Genpa. Her next job experience was to be the Regional Sales Manager at Kariyer.net. During this duty, Gökdere discovered various ways of selling services and reaching users over the internet.

Aslı Gökdere and Her Interest in Decoration

For Aslı Gökdere, decoration has always been a topic that she enjoyed. Successful developments in her career could not make her ignore this area of ​​interest. Thus, the successful entrepreneur found herself writing a blog in the field of decoration. She followed local and international fairs on decoration, and the developments in e-commerce sites in the field of decoration caught her attention.

After a while, Gökdere started selling products on her blog. People's interest in meeting their household needs over the internet pushed her towards an entrepreneurial idea. She rolled up her sleeves for her platform, which she called "Everything Your Home". But it was a bad coincidence that Ikea started using the name as a slogan just before Gökdere joined the market.

Initial Investment Helped Develop Retail Network

Gökdere's entrepreneurship story, which first started with curiosity and then continued with a blog, took a completely different path with the establishment of evmanya.com in 2010.

Gökdere thought that the initial capital would be sufficient for the growth of his platform. She had the opportunity to meet Turgay Ağralı, one of the YKM bosses of the period, at an e-seed event.

Evmanya's supplier network was rather weak at first. The fact that YKM was an investor was of great importance to her company. After Gökdere met Ağralı and agreed on this cooperation, things started to accelerate for Evmanya. YKM shared its retail network with Evmanya and the platform is now able to stand on its own feet.

Second Investment Boosted Digital Marketing

For her second investment, Aslı Gökdere was looking for an investor who had experience in the internet field, had a good command of digital marketing, and had previously collaborated with an e-commerce site. Numerous investors were interviewed during these investor researches, but none of them were sufficient for Evmanya's growth.

When Gökdere met with Hanzade Doğan Boyner, it became clear from whom they would receive the second investment. Doğan Online became the second investor of Evmanya.

This investment, realized in April 2012, increased the sales of the platform 8 times within a year. This was an unexpected, great success for Evmanya.

Three years later, the website received over $5 million in investment. Now Gökdere was targeting an annual turnover of over 20 million TL for her company.

Since the number of e-commerce sites in the world of decoration is less compared to other areas, Evmanya has achieved a rapid rise. But even though there was little competition, it was not easy to do e-commerce when it came to decoration. Because logistics was causing difficulties in this product scale.

Aslı Gökdere and Evmanya - from Retail to Online

In Gökdere's Evmanya adventure, her husband was one of the people who supported her the most. Her husband owned a store on electronics. Aslı Gökdere's first office was on the top floor of her husband's store. At the beginning of Evmanya's establishment, Gökdere initially aimed to sell the products that her husband sold in the store online. She closed the store for a while and concentrated entirely on e-commerce from retail.

Today, majority of the shares of evmanya.com are still owned by Doğan Online. In addition, evmanya.com was completely closed in 2018 and included in Hepsiburada, which belongs to Doğan Online. Evmanya sales began to be made through Hepsiburada as of this date.

Aslı Gökdere, the founder of Evmanya, also stands out as an exemplary name among successful female entrepreneurs.