Editor’s Note
This story of career reinvention highlights how adaptability and vision can forge unexpected paths to success. Ilse Kopper’s journey from medical studies to founding a pioneering online jewelry business serves as a reminder that resilience in the face of early challenges is often the foundation of lasting relevance.
Ilse Kopper planned to graduate in medicine but changed her career path and later dedicated herself to her online personalized jewelry store, Bangili, overcoming difficulties and implementing changes that keep the business relevant.
After graduating high school, Ilse chose medicine and entered the University of Medical Sciences (Ucimed). After two years, she switched to physical therapy at Santa Paula University. She later completed a virtual master’s in education and cognitive development from TEC de Monterrey, Mexico.
The customer base grew little by little, and in 2017 Ilse dedicated herself full-time to her business Bangili. Being adept with platforms, applications, and technological advances, and being extremely careful and meticulous about her work, she took charge of creating the website herself. Bangili was a pioneer.
Opening a physical store, with the costs of procedures and high investment, was not an option in her plans. Ilse created a website on Shopify, a platform for online stores. The ecommerce allowed her to reach people all over Costa Rica. But she faced a barrier that seemed monumental and insurmountable at the time.
Ecommerce, whether through websites or social media, was in its infancy. Major retail chains barely had informational product sites, and few offered shopping carts and payment gateways, the system that allows buyers to pay for their orders with credit or debit cards.
The delivery landscape was similar. Companies providing lockers for online purchases from external sites like Amazon did not offer home delivery. Customers had to go to their offices to pick up packages. Correos de Costa Rica had just started its service.
At Bangili, Ilse knew that sooner or later all of that would change and Costa Rican consumers’ trust and shopping habits would increase. For the moment, they designed an instructional guide so people could learn to shop online.
From the beginning, shipments were made through Correos. The problem was the payment gateway. They knocked on the doors of banks. There were no solutions. Apart from the low volume of local electronic purchases, banks feared the risk of it being used by online casinos and sportsbooks, which were predominant a decade earlier.
Ilse found a solution with a Canadian payment gateway service. But, when a customer in Costa Rica made a payment, the money was not received immediately. The payment was received by the Canadian firm, which then passed it to JP Morgan Chase, an American bank. And then this bank sent it to the Bank of Costa Rica (BCR). They had to wait several days to receive the money. Furthermore, this mechanism had associated costs.
By 2018, the local landscape changed. More people in Costa Rica used online services and electronic payments, charging their debit or credit cards, following the spread of services like Uber and Netflix, among others. The nascent activity of Uber Eats also helped. The definitive transformation came later.
Since 2021, Bangili has offered jewelry personalization as part of its market differentiation. Aware that competition soon copies her service model, Ilse Kopper is already thinking about her new plans to continue differentiating herself in the market.
The advances in ecommerce in Costa Rica accumulated little by little. But in recent years, a leap occurred.
The first change was the possibility of adding payment methods to online stores. BAC began commercializing its service in 2018. That was when Bangili integrated this gateway, which facilitated the sale of its products and sped up the receipt of income.
Currently, BAC offers several services for the online commerce of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): integrating the electronic payment function into websites or mobile apps; a solution to easily generate and manage the online store, personalize the catalog, and perform collections; and facilitating sales on social media, WhatsApp, or emails with payment links.
