Face-to-Face selling

My next plan was to talk to as many dog-owning consumers as possible.  I genuinely enjoy talking to people and learning more about them, and what they want.

I started by setting up shop with my marvellous sign ( http://beastdogwear.com/2010/03/25/the-sign/ ) on the side of the road on the Scenic Drive.  I’d scoped out a good place to sit, where people coming up the hill could see me from a while away, but also with the space to stop if they were interested.

The first day was quite slow; but I was expecting this.  I figured that most people would literally ‘zoom’ by on the first viewing, then hopefully stop the next day or next time they saw me there, if they were interested.

I focused on the after-work crowd.  Around 4-6pm – ie. from the mums picking up their kids, to the workers heading home from the office.  Luckily for me the weather has been absolutely amazing in Auckland in the last couple of months so I could quite happily sit there with a book waiting for passing traffic.

I met some great people while out there.  If there is one lesson I can take away from this experience, is that it is SO important to give some positivity and feedback to people who have put it all on the line to try & launch their own business.  It got so (tedious? I don’t want to say depressing because that is not true) to sit there and watch car after car drive past.  However, those that did stop really admired the collars and ranged from a simple ‘yep I really like this’  to a full-on HIGH-FIVE combined with how they loved what I was doing and giving me a massive feel-good boost from their own enthusiasm.

All I can say from that is please… please… if you see somebody who is obviously going out on their own, starting something for themselves, putting themselves on the line….. and of course if you like their stuff….. please give them feedback! Don’t just walk on by! It is SO important for us little guys to hear that feedback. 

I also did some time at the Meola Reef Off-Lead Dog Park, which seemed like a great place to meet dog owners.  While sitting on the road-side caught perhaps a greater cross-section of the population; the dog park was specifically tailored to those who were there with their ‘beasts’.

The dog park was also great for meeting and chatting to dog owners, and a lot really liked the collars as well.  Major problem – nobody in New Zealand carries cash! I had plenty of people stopping who really liked the collars, but had no cash.  To the point where they were really specific about what they wanted  ‘I love the X collar in the X design and I would love to buy it’ but then having no cash, took the details and went off.  I even had a guy who had two dogs and told me he was going to a cashpoint machine, and would be back within the hour!

Unfortunately, out of at least 30 people spoken to and whom I handed cards to, only ONE who promised to get back to me; did so.  (yay Khaz! Green Koru Design is coming your way)

People really love the collars and give great feedback about the quality, design and suitability for their dogs.  But something happens when they lose sight of you and forget about your wonderful collars and offers.

Next step is to try & come up with a way to try and convert some of these highly interested people into actual sales.

Initial Marketing

I now found myself in the possession of some awesome dog collars - now to sell them.  As I’m sure any other small stock-owning business realises, holding stock takes a certain amount of your cashflow reserves.  As they say, Cashflow is King, so if this business is to grow, I needed to head out into the big, wild world and try to get some of these collars selling!

My first point of call, as I’m sure is the case for a lot of business launches, were family and friends.  I would never push my product on those that didn’t need it or weren’t interested, but positive support and feedback were an important factor in deciding to launch Beast, and I knew of several people with big dogs that were waiting very keenly to get their hands on the first run of collars.

Great start – but of course this type of customer is not going to sustain any business that wants to grow long-term.  I needed to get my ideas out into the world.

Second, came TradeMe.  My cousin sells regularly on TradeMe, getting rid of household goods that she no longer requires.  (But if she sells my wedding present, there will be TROUBLE!) I got some advice from her, reinforcing my belief that there really is synergy in other peoples knowledge.  If you don’t know – then ASK!  There are plenty of people out there that know a lot more than you do, and usually love the opportunity to share their expertise.  TradeMe is working out OK – I got talked into upgrading to the Gallery Listing first up at $3.50 or so – not really cost effective when this encompasses a hefty portion of your sales price – not great for margins!

My cousin advised she does just fine however on a standard listing, which costs $0.55 for the addition of a photo (very important).  So I am giving this a go to see if I can drum up any interest in the collars, directly to consumers.

 One other gripe with TradeMe – ‘Safe Trader’ which seems to be a version of PayPal in that they conduct the buyer/seller transactions for you, and only release the money once all is well.  Unfortunately for smaller transactions such as the collars, they charge a MINIMUM of $4.95.  Yes; capitals for emphasis, but $4.95 is completely unrealistic for a product such as mine and would make selling through them completely un-worthwhile.

Next Stop: Facebook.  As most people have over the past few years, I’ve embraced the facebook lifestyle.  If not quite ‘wholeheartedly’ - after having a 9-month absence in 2008 – then I still find it quite a good way to keep in touch with friends, especially those who might be overseas. 

I have set up a Beast Dogwear Fan page on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/Beast-DogWear/333466548247?ref=ts - You’ll need to be a facebook member to be a fan but otherwise please feel free to join up! I am however a bit disappointed in fan numbers – the page link has been sent to several hundred of my nearest and dearest; and my close relatives/friends nearest and dearest.  I now have 79 fans.  Not bad I suppose; but don’t forget it was sent to people who are supposed to love me! (or at the very least, like me a little bit).  I do have three fans that I have no clue about – don’t know how they found me, who they are, or why they are my fan… It is great!  May it continue!

I’m also working on marketing the web page.  The base of this is a wordpress blog page; which I used when I was travelling in Costa Rica to update my friends and family back home. I then bought the domain beastdogwear.com and linked it to the page.  I have set up an email linked to the domain, submitted it to google for inclusion on their search engine, and am writing posts with tags hopefully designed to drive some relevant traffic to the site.

All of this is totally new to me, and I am enjoying learning some new skills.  Next installment - be amazed at me sitting on the side of the road and in dog parks (note: I loved doing this, it was so great to meet and talk to dog owners!)

Delivery & Photography

It took a couple of weeks to take delivery of the collars, deliver them to the etching company and then get all of the collars back for sale.

In the meantime, I’d visited the etching company a couple of times to check out how things were going.  They were incredibly fantastic in terms of trying out the different designs on the different colours and giving me advice on what would work where.

When they were ready, I headed on down to the shop and I was absolutely blown away with how great the dog collars looked.  They were far better than I’d ever thought could be possible.  You could not keep the grin off my face!

I buzzed around the place delivering collars to those that had pre-ordered different designs and started making plans about what I would do with the rest of them.

My next mission was to develop this website – it seems to be taken seriously in these cyber-active days a website is essential.  First step was to take some pictures of the collars to display them to their best advantage.  As per my entry of ‘the sign’ I really enjoyed the opportunity to do something artistic, and try something that was quite new to my everyday experience.

I live out in the Waitakere Ranges and wanted to use the natural landscape to take the photos.  There were various options available, but as you can see from the main product pages, various backgrounds such as NZ native ferns, trees and rocks were used as backgrounds.

The last time I bought a camera I made a choice after much thought to buy a very simple ‘happy snapper’ as I put it – in fact a Canon Ixus 82IS.  I was sorely tempted to buy something more technical and offering a greater range of photography options; but decided that I would get more mileage out of something that I could point and shoot and get a reasonable photo from most shots.

This camera proved absolutely satisfactory to get the dog collar photos you can see on the main page (any professional photographers can feel free to suggest improvements!) and again I was pretty happy with the range as a marketing tool.

Next post – in fact will be based around how I began to market the collars and an update on how it is all going.

The Sign

No, I’m not talking about some kind of mystical go-ahead from the universe.  I mean that I actually made a real-life sign, advertising my dog collar products.

My brother did a print-making course at diploma level and has made some awesome print artworks over the last few years.  He helped me out with how on earth to make an, um, ‘professional’ looking sign as I have no experience in doing this, and in fact having studied science at school and University, have never done much art at all!

The basic process of making a sign like this is as follows:

Supplies: Sign backing (wood, etc), painters masking tape, pencil, computer & printer, boxcutter knife, applicable colours of spray paint, newspaper, large ruler

- Find a suitable piece of sign material – in my case a piece of wooden board, approx. 1.5m x 1m

- Cover entire board in painters’ masking tape

- Create the images that require stencilling (images, lettering etc) and print them out (if you print outlines only you’ll save printer ink!) get a normal pencil, and rub the pencil onto the BACK of the images, making sure you cover all of the outlines.

- Place them onto the board where required (a long draughtsmans’ ruler will help a LOT with planning this part), and then trace around the outline on the front of the designs, pressing hard.

- Remove the printed outline – you should see a transfer of the pencil rubbing outline onto the masking tape.

- Cut out the outlines of the letterings/ pictures of ONE colour (if you have more than one colour in your design) and peel off the masking tape.  Leave second/third/etc colours with the masking tape intact

- Get the correct coloured spray paint and smoothly paint the cut-out shapes, making sure you spray evenly and not too heavily so it will drip.

- Wait until the first colour is dry, then cover with newspaper or similar.  Take the masking tape off the second colour, spray paint as above.

- Repeat until all colours are complete.

- When all paint is dry, peel off all of the masking tape remaining, to reveal your awesome sign!

I LOVED making this sign, it was such simple pleasure to do something artistic as I don’t normally do artistic pursuits.  I got so excited I emailed all of my friends just to show them what I’d done!

Laying out the printout lettering

All lettering cut out except for the heart which is a different colour

Spraypainting the black images

Black all sprayed, now to cut out the heart shape to paint pink!

The final sign!

Design & Build

The next step after taking the plunge to *actually* go ahead with this business idea is to decide *how* to go ahead.

Ideas were not a problem and after having a bit of a brainstorm I managed to fill a notebook page with potential collar designs – over 25 different ideas. 

To go about actually sourcing suppliers and producing these designs I had some very important must-haves to consider:

- I wanted to have the collars sourced and made in New Zealand, as much as is possible

- I wanted the collars to be design and brand led – to offer consumers something really different and unique

- I needed the collars to be affordable and high-quality, but still taking the above two considerations into account

I managed to find two suppliers to do the collar manufacture and etching; and was very impressed with their service and product.  My next goal was to try & decide what to order.  I in fact knew very little about the dog collar market.  Yes I knew what *I* liked, but did that necessarily translate to what all of the other dog owners wanted?

This was a product of guess work mainly, I have to say.  I chose to get more brown collars as my thinking was it was a neutral colour, which suited a dog of any coat, and embraced the ‘natural’ look of the leather.  I also tried out several of the colours, not being 100% sure which of the designs would look good on which of the fabrics.  The etching company was great with giving me guidance on what would work and what would not.

Sample etchings of the leather proved to be interesting – I had been worried that nothing at all would show up on the black leather, but the koru, dog and star looked great.  The robot was a very delicate etching and so I chose to get red only.  Green I wasn’t sure about but decided to try out a few of that colour to see how they went.

I researched prices online and also tried to set my pricing to a level that would reflect the uniqueness and provenance of the collar, while not being too expensive for the general market.

Finally I’d finished with all of these knotty questions, and the collars were being manufactured for me! Now it remains to sell some!

Starting a small business

Like any business, Beast Dogwear started with an idea, or in my case a strongly held belief and dream.  I have really thought, for many years, that there was a gap in the market for a unique design- and brand-led collar range for larger dogs.

It took around 7 years, several of those living in the UK, a variety of sales jobs in the corporate world and the diagnosis and successful treatment of a potentially fatal illness to finally follow my dream.  I know this is going to be tough, I know that it won’t make enough money to support me for some time, but at the same time the idea has been nagging in my brain for all of these years and I need to see if I can make a success of launching my brand.

At the same time, I’d like to document the actual process, struggle and (hopefully) success of undertaking this process.  I’d like to keep a journal of my day-to-day actions launching Beast, and I hope that this will be an inspiration or at least of interest to others who may also nurture dreams or ideas and one day want to turn them into a reality.

Beast DogWear – 100% Leather Collars for Bigger Dogs

Ever since I got my first dog around 7 years ago – an English Staffordshire Bull Terrier, followed 18 months later by an American Staffordshire Terrier, I was unimpressed by the dog collars on the market for larger sized dogs. There seemed to be plenty of pink sparkly numbers for the small dogs, but for big dogs there were two types – plain or studded. Boring! Finally I have followed my dreams and created a range of unique collars for larger dogs.

• 100% leather with quality metal fastenings
• Designed and Manufactured in New Zealand
• Range of designs and colours to suit a dog with any colour coat
• 3cm x 65cm – will fit dogs with neck size of 43cm – 60cm around

 

These collars retail at only NZ$49 plus any postage and packaging.

If you want to order a collar please contact me at jess@beastdogwear.com