Loft Resumes is a design service dedicated to crafting beautiful and unique resumes that make it into the “interested” stack and help our customers reach their career goals.
When customers hire Loft Resumes, they choose from one of our nearly 50 designs and we typeset their written content into their chosen design thus transforming what used to be an entirely utilitarian document into something more attractive and compelling.
Our customers are not hiring a machine; they’re commissioning trained graphic artists that will typeset every word so that their story is told, their history is communicated, and their accomplishments are revealed. And if a customer can't find a design that's just right for her, then we'll custom make one at her direction.
What are the key factors that have helped your store be successful?
We dedicated a lot of time to market research before creating our business to make sure we had a viable idea. We found that a large number of searches were being made for resume templates and that the return was low. We knew there was plenty to harvest and few workers in the fields. Loft Resumes also approached template design in a way that is unique to resume templates. Our customers send us their content and we typeset it for them. Most templates are not a service like ours and the user is responsible for entering their content.
Loft Resumes has received a lot of good press since we launched. Write-ups in Fast Company and Mashable drove significant unique traffic to our site and continue to do so. Pinterest is consistently a winner for us as well. If you sell anything remotely visual, get it on Pinterest. Today. We also work with online retailers such as FAB and that has been a great experience for us. Their demographic is right up our alley and they get a whole lot of traffic.
We search the internet for the leading blogs on career advice and reach out to them to feature us as well as using our own blog to drive traffic to our site by optimizing posts to a broad range of general career advice topics. We also have strategic partnerships with resume writers to promote their services to our customers and vice versa.
Our business is run by myself, one of the co-founders, along with a team of graphic designers that help with the production design. It's very easy for us to scale since we know about how long each resume design takes one of our designers.
Loft Resumes strives to have excellent customer service and treat all of our customers in an exceptional manner. We know we have a great product based on the wonderful feedback and testimonials we receive, but we can't promise that everyone who uses our service will land a job. Considering that fact, and the fact that many of our customers are out of work, we do our best to have loads of patience and a compassionate heart when working with them. Our goal is to help them get hired. That's the best part about running this company. Knowing that we've already helped a lot of people land new jobs.
What are your top recommendations for new store owners?
Have patience and don't freak out. Your sales may take longer to get going than you think they will and there may be dry-spells every now and then. Other days, sales will be through the roof and you'll wonder how you'll get it all done. Those days are great for your business. Being stressfully busy is a good thing. :)
Know that running your business is probably going to take more time than you anticipate it taking. Get Olark or some other kind of chat software set up on your site. I've closed countless sales chatting to customers on our site in real time. And they love knowing that a real person is there if they need assistance. Take advantage of Shopify's awesome software, tools and know-how. They're always putting fantastic resources on their blog and Facebook page.
Any Closing Remarks?
You can't please everyone. There will be those customers every so often who are less than pleasant to deal with. Press on and be the bigger person. You'll be glad you did!