The last 12 months....
Christianne James (40) founder of the highly successful online baby gift and nursery furniture retailer, 4little1s.com assesses her business over the last twelve months.
Website (http://www.4little1s.com)
We invested heavily when we set the website up as we wanted to relay the message that we were not a small ‘fly by night’ company that would compromise on quality. We used a web design agency that managed the whole project in terms of structure and design, although we had decided from the offset we wanted full control to be able to add and remove products ourselves, rather than having to rely on the design agency each time. I am quite technically minded and felt more than confident to be able to keep this up and have more control. This was a good decision and gives us complete control over our site today.
Stock
We are always very careful with selecting stock although we did take a risk with a more unusual line recently called Deglingos. These are very unusual looking soft toys that take the form of animals However, there is clearly a niche market for these and we get regular orders from Denmark and the UAE for some reason. We have pretty much kept to the same lines when we first started up, although some lines definitely sell better than others. We plan to review one or two lines that we are struggling with and probably just do a straight swap out with another line.
Sales
Some lines we make better margins than others and this has driven the marketing plan with time / effort as to which products to market more than others. Our main sales channel is the Internet and we are glad to making a small profit this year. We have been experimenting with School Fairs and Craft Fairs which have also been very successful. Apart from meeting customers ‘face to face’ any transactions are not usually credit cards as they are cash or cheque based, therefore avoiding any transaction costs. Finally we now have a shop front in one of the larger towns near us which works well and covers its costs as well as bringing in a small profit.
Marketing
We have marketed on a number of campaigns on and offline this year. Thinking back we have had a balloon marketing exercise which produced about a 1% sales, I personally delivered leaflets to a vast number of houses (non targeted) and I don’t think we produced any sales ! (lesson learnt). We also have done a couple of more targeted leaflet campaigns which both produced about 2 % sales. We have also been trying to consider a couple of alliances but nothing came of them; however I suspect will come together over the next few months
We have invested a great deal of time in SEO which we are now starting to see some real improvements. The strategies have been quite far and wide including Blogs, Forums and Social Networking amongst others. We may need to make a judgment call on the sheer volume of time this is taking up and if our time could be spend better elsewhere and then outsource this effort.
My bookcase has grown quite significantly over the last 12 months with everything from Marketing for Dummies to Guerrilla Marketing as well as some other more structured methodologies for Marketing. I am beginning to wonder if I should be concentrating on PR more than Marketing as from the last few months we have been seeing more results, i.e. hard sales, from PR than Marketing. – Food for thought.
The future
We have a combination of a stock and a drop ship model. The margins we make on stock are larger than the drop ship items. However, in some cases the space needed and not having to worry about importing and distributing are big benefits to us. I think we will continue to have a combination of the two to ensure a healthy balance but margins will dictate this.
Lessons learned
I certainly need to learn to be able to delegate more. Working for yourself in a start up means you usually end up being the Finance Director, Managing Director, Operation Director, Sales and Marketing Director …….and the list goes on. Having come from a corporate background where each role had been headed up by one person and a team of people, suddenly it was just little old me! While not too much of a problem initially, I now recognise as we grow it’s just not possible to do each role, well do it efficiently anyway. I need to consider giving more responsibilities to my business partner and also third parties in some of these areas in order to allow me to have a more watching brief.
I have also realised the importance of ‘getting out there’ and seeing people, whether that’s at trade fairs or a marketing or PR stunt, staying inside is not always the best use of time
Investigate alliances and benefits of, in particular with marketing
4little1s.com provides a great range of Izziwotnot Nursery Furniture such as Humphrey’s Corner , Hemingway II or Vanilla nursery sets, as well as Izziwotnot Nursery Bedding such as Humphrey’s Lottie Fairy Princess, Hide Away Bay or Baby Pilot
