Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López and the Saldum Brand Group
Hawkers is the name most shoppers know, but it sits inside a larger corporate shell. Saldum Ventures, the Elche company behind the sunglasses, held four labels when it named a new president in November 2016: Hawkers, Miss Hamptons, Wolfnoir and Northweek.
That president was Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López, according to FashionNetwork, and the company said at the time that it wanted Saldum to work as a holding group with several brands under one roof.
Four Labels, One Alejandro Betancourt López Holding
Northweek came from outside. Àlex Huertas and Héctor Rey founded it in Barcelona in 2013, the same year Hawkers started, and it reached about €2 million in sales in 2014 by letting customers build their own frames from more than 100,000 combinations. Hawkers bought its rival in 2016.
The deal formed part of Hawkers’ push toward €100 million in sales for 2016, Modaes reported, with Miss Hamptons and Wolfnoir rounding out the group’s lineup. Buying a competitor with its own customer base gave the group a second route into the custom-frame segment without building one from scratch.
Selling Through Other People’s Stores
Wolfnoir moved into mainstream retail in September 2016 with a 12-model collection for Springfield, the apparel chain owned by Spain’s Cortefiel group, which carried it in 56 stores in Spain and in shops in about 10 other countries. Hawkers had already produced a 15-model capsule for Pull&Bear, part of Inditex, in March 2016, at an average price of €24.99.
Those partnerships put Saldum frames in front of shoppers who might never click on a social media ad, and they gave the group exposure to two of Spain’s largest clothing retailers within a single year.
Production later moved closer to home as well. Hawkers opened its own frame factory in Elche in 2021, Alicante Plaza reported, giving the lead label in Alejandro Betancourt López’s group a plant in the same city where its founders started the business.
Alejandro Betancourt López has described the result in terms of resilience. “Now it’s a robust company that doesn’t depend on one main stream of revenue,” he said. The group now runs “different strategies at the same time,” he added. He acknowledged the trade-off: Hawkers is no longer the “high growth company, exploding revenues” of its early years, in his words, but it is “more sustainable” and “more of an established company and more predictable company.”
Alejandro Betancourt, chairman since 2016, has left day-to-day operations to Pedro Beneyto, chief executive since October 2022.
Hawkers is the name most shoppers know, but it sits inside a larger corporate shell. Saldum Ventures, the Elche company behind the sunglasses, held four labels when it named a new president in November 2016: Hawkers, Miss Hamptons, Wolfnoir and Northweek. That president was Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López, according to FashionNetwork, and the company said…