Introduce your business and tell us your story: How did you decide on what to sell, and how did you source your products?
After working for several years in a similar industry, and seeing the rising popularity of memes, funny sayings, and pop-culture references on clothing, I decided to take the plunge and start my own clothing line. We have a great steady supply of t-shirts, sweatshirts and hoodies from a local supplier, and we decorate them with our designs in-house. All of our prints are designed by us and applied by us, right here in New York.
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
Originally, we only focused on the Amazon platform. Once we realized they did not offer as much control over our brand as we had hoped, we looked for our own website to be able to have customers we could call our own. What we love about our Shopify site is that the customer is OURS, and not some 3rd party customer that we are "borrowing" from some other site.
Tell us about the back-end of your business. What tools and apps do you use to run your store? How do you handle shipping and fulfillment?
Shipworks has been so vital to how we manage our orders and our shipping; it would be impossible to manage hundreds of orders a day without it. It integrates seamlessly with Shopify and almost every other marketplace out there. We print all our shirts in-house, and ship orders same day or next day. We have chosen USPS as our preferred shipping partner.
What are your top recommendations for new store owners?
Don't wait until you have the "perfect" site... that will never happen. Take action, get things up and running as soon as you can, and make changes along the way. You can even use these changes as marketing points as you gain new customers.