Introduce your business and tell us your story: How did you decide on what to sell, and how did you source your products?
I saw an opportunity to try to make some extra money on the side by doing something that I love. Shopify made it possible since I have no programming experience to be able to open a typical online retail store. Some of our products are made overseas and some are manufactured in the USA. Most all of our vendors have showrooms in LA or we find them at markets that we travel to multiple times a year.
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
Our first sale actually came before we had even "launched" our site. We had it visible doing some final testing and a sale came through from someone that we didn't know. Finding targeted keywords that people search for was key for us starting out. Our online store is still generating the most traffic for us. We started it first and it has provided us the opportunity to open our brick and mortar.
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?
Google Adwords helps us manage our adwords campaigns all through our Shopify app, Mailchimp is who we use for our email campaigns. It's super easy to use since it integrates with Shopify and we dont have to export all of our customers' email addresses to an external site. We handle all shipping and fulfillment in-house.
What are your top recommendations for new store owners?
Don't be afraid to try new things. You don't ever know what's going to work and what won't. And if you don't ever try, you'll regret not knowing what could have come.