Who we are
With more than 30 years of combined experience in cooling and fresh-air equipment, the All Cool team brings together fairly different profiles that nonetheless fit well together: people who share the same vision of the company and the same day-to-day enthusiasm.
The adventure really began in 2011, when Benoit Richard, a young entrepreneur from the Lozere region of France, then aged 33, decided to start his own business. The project moved quickly and, as new colleagues joined, grew into something broader: presenting the public with the most capable and reliable products in the field, and by extension across everything to do with keeping cool.
In 2018, the company Harmonia, through its au-frais.fr website, specialised in testing and reviewing equipment, with the aim of becoming a reference in the field and of only ever recommending the best. The current team of 9 people has not changed since then, which has given us the stability to agree on the direction the online store should take and on the editorial line we wanted to follow. That is how All Cool became a hybrid site: at once an online store for cooling equipment and a review and testing site, while broadening its range thanks to the support of major outside retail partners such as Amazon and ManoMano. With their extremely wide catalogues, they let us offer, or keep listed, products we do not yet have, or no longer have, in our 600 sq m warehouse.
Our team is a close-knit one, proud of the values its members share, particularly around ethics and the environment, and proud to know that it is driven more by a shared passion than by purely commercial concerns. Our testers, and the rest of the team with them, are genuinely involved and motivated, so that we can offer our customers, and internet users more broadly, a truly impartial selection of the best products on the market.
Our partners
As you may have noticed, and as we mentioned above, we have chosen to list products on our site that we do not hold in stock (either because they are out of stock, or because we have not yet added them to our own catalogue, or because in certain specific cases we have decided not to). To be able to offer a genuinely complete and impartial selection of the best products in each of our categories and sub-categories, we decided to team up with various players on the web (with catalogues far larger than our own), and to give our visitors the option of buying those products from those partners rather than from us.
We focused on marketplaces and sites carrying a very large number of references in the areas that interest us, such as the unavoidable Amazon and the excellent French site ManoMano, our two main partners (almost all of our products are on sale with one and/or the other), along with other more or less well-known players such as Fnac, Cdiscount, eBay, Rakuten, Alibaba, Banggood, Fasttech, GearBest and so on.
In some cases we earn a commission on sales made at our retail partner, in other cases we do not, and earn absolutely nothing. Our goal is not purely commercial, since we also want to be a genuine help in choosing a product and a source of reviews that are useful to everyone. That said, we do have costs and a team to pay (yes, really), so if a partner can pay us a commission, that is good news for us. Even so, and still in the interest of being impartial and thorough, we cannot limit ourselves to products sold by partners that pay us a commission, which is why, for a number of products, we link to a partner from which we earn nothing.
It felt important to make this clear, both out of a commitment to transparency and because our site's format is unusual and can puzzle some visitors, or raise questions about how we operate: hence this explanatory section.
Finally, we are very much open to future partnerships, all the more so with small outfits like ours, ideally French or European, so please do get in touch if you manufacture or distribute products related to what we do. It is a good thing if we can spread our outbound links across several partners, rather than relying only on huge marketplaces that inevitably carry almost every product we have selected for you.