Who Is Eyüp Sabri Tuncer? An Interview with Engin Tuncer

With classic lemon cologne that has entered our lives, Eyüp Sabri Tuncer Company, which has 95 years of rooted history, continues to be the center of attention of its customers with its increasingly diverse product range. We also conducted a pleasant interview with Mr. Engin Tuncer, the 3rd generation representative of Eyüp Sabri Tuncer Company, to share this development from history to the present day with you.

Could you tell us about yourself and your professional background?

I am the 3rd generation representative of Eyüp Sabri Tuncer company, founded in 1923, and I also serve as Chairman of the Board. Born in Ankara in 1964. With the education and discipline understanding that comes from family, I worked regularly in our company from a young age. During my elementary school years, I would go to our store in Ulus after school, and after finishing my homework, I would start working. Our store here continues to operate today while maintaining the same structure. At that time, I always observed the customers who came to our store. [caption id="attachment_99642" align="aligncenter"] Eyüp Sabri Tuncer[/caption] Thanks to our awareness of the importance of customer satisfaction, at age 18, I conducted customer-focused surveys while traveling across Turkey. By interpreting these surveys, we initiated restructuring work on production, sales, and customer relations. This is one of the reasons why our relationships with customers are strong. Today, we continue to build customer relationships, which we still regard as part of development, on the basis of mutual respect, honesty, and trust. Beyond all this, I became someone who always closely follows technological developments and innovations. After a trade fair I attended, I began to be curious about computer technology, and despite it being found in only a few banks in Turkey in 1982, I ensured that our company acquired it.

In family companies, children always have an important place. You grow up in an environment where you can learn about business at a young age, and inevitably you find yourself at the very center of the business.

Throughout my career, I have always seen myself at the center of business, and as an executive who grew up within the business, I have taken roles in many responsibilities including production and sales. I have over 30 years of experience in the sector. Since I am someone who loves research very much, I continue to follow many markets, both sectoral and non-sectoral, at home and abroad in a current manner, and participate in trade fairs. This allows us to keep our production technologies and the content and packaging quality of our products at world standards and to continue developing them. In addition, I serve as president of the Century-Old Brands Association. We are an association where 30 precious brands, which held a central place in commercial, economic, and cultural life from the Ottoman Empire period to the beginning of the Republic era, come together to try to maintain their traditional values. Each brand has a unique story worth protecting, knowledge, and experiences that they want to pass on to the future as a cultural heritage. We continue to increase and guide our work to multiply these accumulations.

As a company with 95 years of rooted history, could you tell us about Eyüp Sabri Tuncer's success story?

  My grandfather Eyüp Sabri Tuncer had a disciplined, hardworking, honest, and entrepreneurial nature. He gave the brand his own name so that his customers would feel he was always someone they could consult. Having started operating in Ankara in 1923, he conducted catalogs, promotions, and marketing activities for his store, which was called a bonmarché at that time—activities that were not very common in those days—and was very successful. Through coupons he prepared on the back of catalogs he hand-drew, he promoted his colognes, which were called lotion at the time, free of charge. Similarly, at Ankara Train Station, he would pour cologne into the hands of arriving passengers and explain where it was sold and its uses. This led to queues forming in front of our Ulus store, and the solid foundations of our journey lasting until today were laid.

In the 1950s, my father Sabahattin Tuncer entered business with his interest in plants and essence production, and took on the responsibility of the family company. The essences used in colognes were imported from abroad at that time.

My father, who was passionate about essence production, wrote letters to major companies abroad, conducted research on essences, and tried to obtain sources by using his resources. With a reply from a Switzerland-based company months after his letter, the foundation of domestic essence production was laid. In 1967, his work bore fruit, and by developing his own lemon cologne formula, he became the first in Turkey. With essence production, as our raw material prices decreased, our cologne prices also fell, which positively affected our sales. With the addition of different essences for scented colognes, our production capacity increased significantly. In 1994, one year after I took over the responsibility from my father Sabahattin Tuncer, we built a highly modern factory on 7,000 m2 of land in Ankara Lalahan, capable of completely computer-based production with high production capacity. The increase in our production capacity formed the basis for the search for new products and markets, and we began room spray production. Based on a book by Güven Borça, we started research work with the goal of creating a world brand from Turkey, and decided to position our brand where our customers want to see it and to expand our product range. Currently, with our product range exceeding 600 items and our exports to 7 continents, we can see how close we are to this goal.

Could you tell our readers a bit about the history of cologne?

Because it was produced in the German city of Cologne in the early 18th century, cologne is called Kölnisch Wasser, or Cologne water. As cologne spread throughout Europe, in the 19th century it found its place among French usage areas and was named "Eau de Cologne," and this has continued to the present day. The appreciation of beautiful fragrance, dating back centuries, spread rapidly with cologne, and it entered our history with its production by Ahmet Faruki in the 19th century. It was initially called odikolon, cologne water, and later cologne. With the interest of Abdülhamid II, cologne, which spread rapidly from the Ottoman Empire period to the Turkish Republic, became the focus of many domestic producers with its low price and pleasant fragrance. Today, Turkish-style Cologne perception and Classic Lemon Cologne stand out.

What are your products and the sectors you serve?

Through research conducted with Güven Borça in 2009, we concluded that among the products consumers expected from us were home care and cleaning products. Up to 2010, we added a new dimension to our work with cologne by introducing the first biocidally licensed room fragrance in Turkey, with proven effectiveness against 24 different bacteria. Today, among our over 600 product varieties, we have lotion, cream, liquid soap, shampoo, hair cream, shower gel, surface cleaner, candles, stick room fragrances, and body fragrances.

Looking from the past to the present, could you tell us about your cult products that customers cannot do without? Why do you think consumers use these products?

The Classic Lemon Cologne, which we call the traditional Turkish-style Cologne extending from the past to the present, is among our customers' indispensables. Along with this, we also have cologne options such as Tobacco, Memories, and Paris Night, which have marked and become cult for a period. With vegan-certified, paraben-free shea butter and vitamin E-enriched natural olive oil hand and body lotions that we have developed on the path to becoming Turkey's personal care brand, we have become the market leader in this category in Turkey. Again, according to field research reports we conducted with our natural olive oil liquid soap products, we will achieve the market leader position in this segment within 2018. At the top of the reasons why our customers prefer us are the opportunity to buy the highest quality product at the most economical price, 95 years of unchanged infinite customer satisfaction, and our having a product range that appeals to every generation suitable for cosmetic product trends and needs. To ensure that our products have a standard, we never compromise on our quality understanding, and we give maximum importance to feedback from our customers. We view the honest and transparent relationships we have developed with our customers as the sole element that has brought our brand to this point.

What are your domestic and international sales activities? Which regions in Turkey and the world do you serve, and which factors do you consider in determining these services?

As Eyüp Sabri Tuncer cosmetics, with 4 different brands under our roof, today we export to over 70 countries on 7 continents. Through our distributors in various countries around the world, from America to Australia, from Taiwan to Saudi Arabia, we bring health and beauty to the lives of people of all colors and many nationalities. Our goal in export activities is to focus on high value-added products under our own brands, open new markets in connection with our country's growth goals, and develop lasting and honest commercial relationships in every country we enter, thereby raising our country's quality perception and introducing our values to the entire world.

What is your approach to R&D? What investments has Eyüp Sabri Tuncer made in R&D?

With our growing product range and increasing export volume, our efforts in new product development continue to accelerate over the years. In this context, within our R&D center located in our production facilities in Ankara, we work with highly qualified chemist and chemical engineer staff on both our new product investments and efforts to increase the benefit capacity of our existing products. We keep all the possibilities brought by technology ready in our R&D centers and, starting with trade fairs, we organize travels with our teams to many points around the world in the scope of design and product development work to closely monitor developments and where trends are heading.

If we consider the undeniable power of technology, could you tell us about the latest technologies you use and the momentum these technologies have brought to your brand and the sector?

Eyüp Sabri Tuncer's culture of using technology is a tradition dating back very far. Since the years we were founded, we have been leading and pioneering in many areas such as production, wholesale sales, retail sales, import, export, and online sales. For example, in the early 1980s, we were one of the first companies in Turkey to implement computerized sales and accounting principles by the state. In the early 2000s, we launched Turkey's first online cosmetics shopping site. In our factory, we follow innovations every year and raise the level of mechanization, minimizing human-oriented error risks. With the innovations we designed, we add momentum not only in our own sector but also to the sectors we are associated with. An example of this is the development and widespread use of the "Braille alphabet" in our packaging for visually impaired citizens, which entered our lives with Eyüp Sabri Tuncer products for the first time in our country in the early 2000s. Through the efforts we made for the widespread adoption of this practice, which has become almost a standard today, the printing sector also renewed its machine parks and came to the position of meeting production requests coming from neighboring countries in this direction.

What services do you aim to provide to the personal care and home care sectors in the coming years?

In line with our R&D work and changing customer demands, we are rapidly continuing to add new products to our existing product range in both personal care and home hygiene categories. Our focus here will be to maintain the leading position our brand has achieved by creating natural ingredient-based, nature and animal-friendly, high-efficiency products.

How do you evaluate production and consumption volume in the personal care sector in particular?

We see that the personal care sector is recording serious increases every year, not only in our country but also around the world. Regardless of countries' income levels, beyond the need for people to feel good and beautiful, as the necessary inputs, technology, and international trade to provide these have become widespread, cosmetics have ceased to be a luxury consumption channel and have become a necessity. We believe that as a country, we need to evaluate this growing potential very well every year. By understanding our country's and the world's needs very well, we should shift our product development efforts along with our production processes in this direction.

In a world dominated by consumption, could you tell us about the social responsibility projects you carry out to add value to humanity?

We are proud to be a component of the UN GLOBAL COMPACT initiative, conducted under the United Nations umbrella since 2010, for the most effective use of our world's limited resources, productivity, transparency, and the concept of sustainability to become part of all humanity's lives. Each year, with the sustainability report we prepare on this subject, we report on what activities we have engaged in during the year and provide our stakeholders with an opportunity for transparent communication. We continue to support efforts to create mass benefits by contributing to ideas and work developed under this umbrella. Furthermore, we are a founding member of the Global Apprenticeship Network (GAN) Turkey organization, established under the leadership of the G20 community of developing and developed countries, which our country is also part of, with the support of the International Organization of Employers (IOE) and ILO near the OECD. Through this organization, we support work being conducted to find solutions to our country's bleeding wound, the skilled workforce problem, to train human resources, and to evaluate this workforce in the production field, thereby reducing youth unemployment rates to the maximum extent.