October 2017 marked a turning point for Hawkers, the Spanish sunglasses brand based in Elche, when Alejandro Betancourt Lopez led a €50 million Series A investment round. Weeks later, he took the title of president, a role that put him at the top of the company’s ownership structure without placing him behind the counter of any of its stores. That sequence, investment first and formal leadership second, gave outside observers a clear read on how the relationship between investor and brand would work going forward.
Physical stores followed in 2018, a year after the round closed, and the brand kept expanding store by store until it reached 60 locations by 2025. Betancourt Lopez’s role in that growth, though, has stayed narrowly defined since the day he signed on. Sixty stores mark a scale most single-round investments never reach, yet the man who wrote the check has kept his own footprint at headquarters narrow throughout.
What the President Actually Does
President and largest shareholder Alejandro Betancourt Lopez oversees fundraising and institutional relations, work that keeps capital flowing and outside partners connected to the company’s direction. He also works directly with the CEO, CFO and COO, the three executives who run Hawkers’ day-to-day operations and answer to him on questions that touch capital and governance. That arrangement puts him in the room for decisions about capital structure and leadership hires, not the room where store layouts or seasonal pricing get decided.
That list stops short of product decisions, marketing campaigns, and pricing, all matters Betancourt Lopez leaves to the team built to handle them. The split gives Hawkers a president focused on capital and structure while day-to-day retail decisions stay with people closer to the storefront, a boundary that has held steady even as the store count climbed toward 60. It’s a division of labor common among investor-executives, though few draw the line as publicly as Betancourt Lopez has at Hawkers.
Following What Already Flies
Alejandro Betancourt Lopez has summed up his broader approach in a single line: “When things fly by themselves and they go so well, you just follow them through.” Hawkers’ expansion from a single €50 million round to 60 stores across nearly a decade fits that description well. The line captures a mindset built for scale, not for micromanagement, and Hawkers’ own trajectory since 2017 backs it up.
Sixty storefronts, a functioning executive team, and years of growth since 2018 gave him little reason to step into decisions the operators were already handling well. His role stayed fixed on fundraising, institutional relations, and the leadership he’d helped assemble. The daily churn of running a retail brand stayed with the people who show up to it every morning. Nine years after the Series A closed, the arrangement he set at the outset has changed very little.
