Who will become known as “the European Zappos”? Two young companies in France, Sarenza and Spartoo, are running a neck-and-neck race to take control of the online footwear market in Europe:

• Sarenza (left) has raised its revenues from 8.7 million Euros in 2007 to 20 million Euros in 2008.

• Spartoo (right) has grown from 5 million Euros in 2007 to 15 million in 2008. They’ve also targeted 25 million for 2009 and 100 million for 2012.

Spartoo has up till now made two internal financing rounds totalling 5.5 million Euros. The Sarenza management, who took over from the original founding team, had to bolster the original 10 million Euros of investor capital with a second financing round of 3 million (2 million of which was from their own pockets).

Both companies launched in 2005 and want to expand across Europe. Spartoo has recently become active in Italy.

(Impetus for this post comes from Thorsten Boersma’s German blog, with a post on, “What can the German online shoe market learn from Zappos and Sarenza?)

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.