Hey LullySelbSquad! It's my second blogpost of the year and instead of doing the whole New Years resolution and goal setting, I thought I'd like to spend some time reflecting on the mistakes I've done with Lully Selb. While we fumble upon problems and hiccups on a daily basis, there were some bigger problems that were caused by perhaps not-so-good decisions. So here's 3 costly mistakes that I hope none of you ( entrepreneurs ) reading this, should make!
- Creating something without customer research
If you have followed us closely and know us well enough, you'll agree that we're big on prints ! We take designing our prints very seriously and it's our unique selling point. Many of you have also commented that you can spot a Lully Selb printed shawl from a far! Yes we have succeeded:) But somewhere 2 years back in 2016, we wanted to try something different, so we launched a line of Lully Selb Essentials, thinking that it could compliment our printed merchandise. We designed some basic tops and jackets, did a photoshoot as usual and launched it! Response was alright, lower than expectation so we kept marketing it and tried different Creatives. After the period of launch, it became slower. We're stuck with inventory and was hard to move on to the next collection.
Lesson learnt - ALWAYS start with market and customer research. Upon reflection, we realised our customers love our prints and only want nothing else but prints from us! Well that's one costly mistake!
Shop our essentials now, they're on SALE!
2. Coming out with too many products per season
While we were new in the business back then, we were so excited about the progress we're making that we kept creating new prints and products. Every other month, we designed new collection, did a campaign and market it on our social media platforms. After a good 2 years, we realise that there are some prints that are consistently in demand from our customers. Hence we decided to experiment using different colours to freshen the look of our best-sellers shawls instead of creating a whole new print from scratch.
Lesson learnt - Leverage on your creativity instead of cracking your heads to start a new! So we came out with different colours for our signature, best seller - Graphic Shawl only for our VIP Subscribers. This subscription plan is called the VIP Prints Collectors Club. The below dusty colours will be launched soooooon, only for VIPs! Click here to learn more. If you wanna give our shawls a try, my suggestion is to go for the original colour, check it out here.
3. Jumping on the social media marketing wagon without fully understanding it.
The word social media and digital have been widely used these days and as a brand that is mainly operating online, we experimented a lot on Instagram and Facebook to gain more awareness. There are so many different types of campaigns you can run on Facebook and they kept changing their Algorithm. I went on to run the click to website campaign not knowing how it works. What it actually means it that each time someone clicks your website via the campaign, you get charged based on the budget you set. We ended up spending a lot running ineffective advertising campaigns.
Lesson learnt - Read and research thoroughly on Facebook Advertising. There are loads of resources out there. Just sit down and dedicate one day to understand the basics and keep practising!
With the latest news that Mark Zuckerberg's is trying to "Fight to save Facebook", we have to be more cautious and read more before diving into it.
Having said all that, I hope you'll have a great 2018 and if you wanna get to know us better, do come down for a cosy LS Experience Workshop happening on 28 January, 11am to 1pm. Here for more details. We'll be showing you what we did for our special collaboration with a Bruneian Designer that will be featured in London!
Till then,
Selb
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