Written by Jacquelin Montgomery
We’ve been working on building this business for a good few months now. We’ve learned a lot and have way more to learn. I wanted to give a little insight into what it has been like the past few months and some of the challenges we’ve faced.
The two big topics that come to mind when I categorize the different aspects of building our business are “trial and error” and “learning”. Although these can go hand-in-hand, I will do my best to explain them separately.
Trial and Error
This is one of the stages that will continue for a while. To be blunt, we don’t know what we’re doing. We may think trying something one way will get us the results we want but once we try it we realize quickly that we were completely wrong. Does that mean we now know the correct way to do it? Absolutely not. Unfortunately, there are a million ways we could go about each thing that we do. To our demise, that makes it very difficult.
I will admit that I have not researched at all like I should to learn what we need to do for certain things. Dustin has been much better at researching than I have. When I think about researching, it kind of stresses me out. I understand it’s part of what we need to do but, with this not being our full time jobs and having other responsibilities outside of our full time jobs, certain things sound like more work than what I can mentally get myself to do. As cruddy as that sounds, it’s true.
We obviously want this business to work out but we also don’t want to stress ourselves out to the point of crying. We are not trying to lose our sanity here. Even though our lack of research is part of the struggle, trial and error will follow us no matter what. We keep reminding ourselves that this will take time and not everything we do will produce the outcomes that we want. We have no choice but to try and give ourselves some grace.
Learning
Even though we have both been in positions where we’ve tried to make some sort of business work out, it seems every time we come up with a new business adventure idea that it won’t be that hard. With that being said, we are wrong every time. I’m not sure why it hasn’t been ingrained in our brains yet. Trying to build and grow a business is really hard. There are so many small things you don’t think about until you have immersed yourself in it.
I had read a couple articles that said starting a blog can help your business. I originally and immediately dismissed it every time I read it because it seemed like work I didn’t want to do at the time. I read another article recently that went over some topics on how to grow your business and, again, it said to start a blog. This time, I actually thought about it. I’ve started (then deleted) and almost re-started a blog a couple times before this. I feel that I am at least a decent writer when it comes to things I actually want to talk about which seemed to only come about 10% of the time in grade school and college. With my own blog, I will have the freedom to only and always write about things I’m interested in writing about.
Learning is a never ending process. Even if you have gotten the highest degree possible and all the certifications possible, there will always be more to learn. Personally, I enjoy learning (depending on the topic). Despite that, I still struggle sometimes to get myself to spend time on learning what I want to.
Whether or not what we’re currently trying out helps our business, it is all a learning experience (and possibly more trial and error situations) but at least I’m doing something that I enjoy and feel I am good at. (Please don’t be too hard on me if you feel otherwise.)
Things We Haven’t Gotten Right
One of the things we’ve had to redo multiple times is the pricing for our items. In the very beginning, I didn’t pay as much attention to what the markup was and assumed the auto setting was a good start. I was wrong and realized we probably had them marked up too much to start. So, I changed the pricing on everything. I think I’ve done that twice. Maybe three times…
Then, I realized that each color for each size does not have the same cost. So, I started redoing the pricing again. It’s a time consuming task that I originally thought would take me a few days to do but, with the help of some procrastination, it only took me about a month. I promise we’re doing our best.
Another thing we are struggling to figure out is advertising. I’m not sure if we need to change which platforms we advertise on or if we need to research more about SEO settings but we aren’t getting the best results. And honestly, it’s probably not going great because we need to research both. The lack in doing so is a flaw in myself that I have come to terms with. So, those will get added to our list of things we should do and we’ll see when we have the energy and mindset to do them. With all seriousness though, advertising is a whole beast to tackle on its own. It’s not a simple matter by any means and what I find while researching today could easily change a week from now. That, however, is no excuse for us to not light a fire under our butts.
To Wrap It All Up
We’re trying our best. Don’t be hard on us. The end.
Just kidding. Maybe… We truly are trying our best to build this business. We have so many ideas that we just have to find the time to work on. We also have multiple ideas that are currently in the works. Our next limited edition collection has already been started. We are brainstorming types of videos we could make and other platforms we can go on that might be better or at least helpful in our journey to figure out what works best for our business. Just know that we are always striving to make things better.
We know we currently don’t have many designs specifically catered to our mission but we have ideas in the works that will help to build on it. It’s a fine line between trying to go with what’s trending and trying to stick to our brand’s mission. As we’ve mentioned before, our brand is not just about the money or trying to get recognized. However, starting out, we feel that we do need to stick a little more towards trending to start building a customer base and getting our name out there. Although, we are currently working on a series that is very much catered around our brand. We aren’t sure yet when it will be fully dropped but we will have the first five designs on our website within the next few days. We truly hope you will be here to see the series and all of our upcoming limited edition collections.