MicksGarage.com motoring along very nicely

Ireland may have missed out at this year's Eurovision Song Contest but the Crean brothers from Mayo have high hopes of coming home winners from this year's European E-Commerce awards to be presented in Barcelona next week.

Twins Michael and Ciaran Crean are the brains behind online car parts and accessories retailer MicksGarage.com

Their business began life in a bedroom in 2004. Now it’s an €11 million turnover company employing 48 people in a 40,000sq ft premises in Dublin’s Park West campus.

Initially the brothers battled to get enough products for their site. Today they have 5.6 million unique listings, and are shipping 1,000 orders a month to 70 countries.

Ciaran Crean comes from a software background. Michael became interested in IT when he lost his job as a car parts sales rep.

“Not having formal IT training was actually an advantage when we were building our systems as I had no preconceptions and no inhibitions when it came to trying things to solve the problems we faced.”

MicksGarage was conceived as an online operation only from the outset but had a slow start as the brothers had little cash to back it.

However, by 2008 they had reached a turnover of €600,000 and landed their first investment of €560,000 from Enterprise Ireland, AIB Seed Capital and private investors. At the end of 2012 they raised €2.3 million in venture capital.

But while the name MicksGarage sounds homely and the light-hearted mug shots of employees on its website suggests the company doesn’t take itself too seriously, nothing could be farther from the truth.

The company has carefully built its distinctive branding and has underpinned its operation with super-smart IT systems largely developed in-house. “We don’t go looking at what other people are doing. We want them looking at us and wondering how we’re doing what we’re doing.”

MicksGarage recently recruited five staff to work in the area of big data analytics, and a decade on is now as much a technology company as a supplier of car and travel accessories.