How & why I started my first 3 Brands

In this ep I talk about the very early stage. Going from idea and concept to turning it into a business. If you enjoyed this and want me to keep going with the next 3 reach out to me on instagram and let me know and ill do the next 3 in my next episode 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello my friend. Welcome, welcome. This podcast is all about business. Sometimes I'll talk about scaling a business. Sometimes I'll talk about brand. Sometimes I like to share behind the scenes of my business. As somebody who has had 11 businesses over 19 years, I've dipped my toes in all different industries. I've exited quite a few businesses. I've had seven-figure success stories with quite a few. So it's a little bit of everything here. And I know that most people that follow and listen already have a business, but there are some that don't have one yet. They follow for more aspirational reasons because they would love to have a business. So I thought I would start today talking about how to actually start a business and how or more so about how I started some of my businesses. I've been getting that question a lot lately. So let's just kick off. My very first business, which was well, my first business, I bought a hair salon, and that was because I was already renting space at the front of it. I was a makeup artist in the front of the salon. I knew that I wanted to do makeup from a permanent place, so I just scaled the street, scoured, scoured the street, and found hair salons that had a bit of space, and I asked them, and one lady actually said, Yeah, sure, you can rent the front. So that's how I got my first start into business was I had a little Napoleon Purtis kit set up and I did makeup from the front of that makeup, that hair salon. And then a few months later, she wanted to sell. So I managed to get a loan and I bought that salon for $30,000 and I employed hairdressers and then I had a hair salon. Not so long after that, a little brochure came in the mail, and it was to invite me to a stores online seminar from America. They were doing the big tour. Online stores weren't really such a big thing back then, but I thought, okay, let's go along and see what this is about. And I also got the manager of the salon, who was my best friend, to come to the seminar with me, and we both went along. And it was very interesting. I left there, they'd sold me. I had no intention of buying anything, I just wanted to go and listen. But they sold me into their package, which was a $500 package, and that was to get started, and that was for me to have my own online store, which didn't really exist back then, it was very new. And I remember walking my my best friend was going to do it as well, but she got cold feet and she said I just wouldn't even know where to start. So I thought, all right, I'll go all in myself. And I remember having to put that $500 on a payment plan. So we all have to start somewhere. And I went home and I thought, okay, I've got this online store. It's like they set it all up for you. You use their platform, and then you just have to plug in whatever product you're selling. You you just have to, it's like a template, you go and plug in whatever it is that you're selling. And I went through this whole catalogue of things, mobile phones, um, kids' toys, clothing, sex toys, even, and I landed on wedding dresses. I don't know why, I just landed on wedding dresses. So I found a manufacturer on Alibaba, and I got all of their images, and I worked, I had conversations with them, and I put them onto my website, and I just went and put this link in some bridal forums. I think I paid about $30 a month to advertise on this bridal forum, and that really paid off for me. I would probably get my dresses were $550 a month, custom made, would get delivered to their door. I was kind of the good the middleman between ordering from China directly yourself or eBay, and there were a lot of horror stories, so people were very afraid of that, and still being able to have something customized to you, or going couture or buying off rack, but it was expensive, and some people just couldn't afford that. So I was that in-between ground. You didn't have to go full cheap budget, $100, $200 from China, and risk not loving it. You could get one from for $5.50 from me, you send me your measurements, we get it customized. If anything goes wrong with it, that's our problem to deal with. And so I really found this gap in the market, and I made sure that it came to me first. I boxed it beautifully because how they experience your brand is very important. So even though you would say this is a budget brand, I still wanted them to have a premium experience. So I made sure that they felt very special when they were sit, they opened this beautiful big white magnetic clasp satin ribbon box with bride's closet. Um, it was in like a gold foil on the lid. And when they opened it, the tissue paper was branded, there was a scent, and then they would open their dress. So it was a really beautiful experience for them. So that was my second business, and yeah, the dresses were $5.50 a week. I only advertised in the bridal forum, and that was how I got all of my business and word of mouth. And if I found bridal forums, I would just go chat inside them as well. Then I did some trade shows, some um, some bridal shows, pop-up shows, and I went and did those around New South Wales. I remember going to Wollongong, I remember going to Blacktown. I didn't know these places, I just saw the bridal expos, and I thought, okay, that's probably about the right demographic. And yeah, that went really well for me. And sometimes I might sell one dress and make the $550. It cost me around $100, $120 with the packaging. Sometimes I might sell four dresses, and that would be over $2,000, and then sometimes I might get really lucky and sell six dresses in a week. So it was really good money for me to do that from home while I was a mother at home. And that was one that I I wasn't it wasn't something I wish existed, but I was filling a gap. Then moving on to the next business, which was Princess Ratbag, my children's clothing label. And again, not something I wish existed, but filling a gap. It was all about children's petty skirts, which didn't exist in Australia at the time, and they were very big in America. I could see they were trending. I could see on photography forums that photographers in Australia were ordering them by them in bulk from America because they we didn't have them here, and it was still very expensive for them to get it from America. They were paying about $120 each at a discounted rate. And so I spoke to my manufacturer who did the wedding dresses because she did petty skirts. That's how I came onto the idea. And we started the brand. I launched that I launched a Facebook page that day, the day the day she first showed me the petty skirts. Launched a Facebook page, put the images up that she gave me, named it. I reached out to hundreds of photographers on email, sent them my Facebook page to show them what I was selling, and I just pitched the idea to them and said, Look, first five people to contact me, I'll give you three in exchange for photography, and the rest of you can have it for $50 each introductory offer. And so I ended up with quite a few hundred Petty Skirt orders by that night, which was around $15,000 to $20,000 in my bank, which was incredible. And that went on to grow to 70 stockists in the first year, and it really took off. And the thing about that brand was the positioning, and this is something really important that everybody needs to be aware of. Your positioning is important, just like Bride's Closet, my bridal label. Yes, it was low cost in the bridal industry, but it still it was low cost, but still premium positioning for the low-cost market. So I didn't I didn't use the word budget, I didn't use the word cheap. I wanted it to still feel luxurious for them, but it was just a lower end of the market. Princess wrap bag, premium positioning. And not every brand has to be premium positioning. You might come in and say, I want to be in that budget space, and that's fine too. That works really well. As long as you stick to your positioning, you have to stay in your lane, you have to make sure everything points in that direction. Nothing confuses the buyer because confusion sends them away real quick. The more concise you can be about who your brand is for and where you're positioned in the market, the less time it takes them to trust your brand, and the less confusion happens. So Princess Rat Bag was premium positioning for a children's wear label. They paid $80 to $95 for a skirt for one item, and it came boxed beautifully. And it really was about those touch points. I wanted the children to feel like it was very whimsical, and I wanted the parents to be proud of something that they were collecting for their child and feel like it was an experience for them too. So for the mothers, I had a mothers club, which was on Facebook, Facebook group, and that really connected the mothers, and it was almost like a forum in itself. And for the children, when they received a petty skirt, again, beautiful unboxing experience. I had custom-made lollipops, you know, those beautiful it would be big, it would probably be like the the size of a child's face, and it swirled around in a circle with two or three colours, and I always had them custom made in the colours of the petty skirt for the season. So my seasonal collections, I had petty I had lollipops made in those colours, and I would send that, and it would be wrapped in the plastic with a big ribbon around it. So it was a really beautiful experience for the child and the mother. And a lot of the parents would have a clot a beautiful little rack in their children's room as decor with their petty skirts on it. That's how much they collected the skirts. So that was another business that I didn't create because I wish existed, but I definitely was filling a gap and I was creating an experience and I was building community. And I would say that's the first brand where I really understood community and it really took off from there. I'm going to do one more of my businesses because I have 11, and that will be a very long episode. So I'll do one more in this episode. But if you enjoy this and you want me to keep going with the rest of them, let me know. Send me a message, share the potty to your stories, and tag me. Let me know you're enjoying it, and I'll go on and I'll do the next few. So the next business was Happy Little Dumplings, and this is something I wish existed, and it was filling a gap in the market. At the time, you could only get dumplings from Chinatown or Sunnybank, and my best friend and I would go to both of them and take time off out of our workday and go to them. But it wasn't the most convenient. Sunnybank was a bit of a drive. Chinatown, you had to pay a lot of money for parking. But when the craving hits, the craving hits, and we're foodies, so we would make it happen. And one day over drinks, barbecue one night at her house, a little bit of a party and some drinks. We came up with this brilliant idea to start a dumpling business at the markets. And two weeks later, we were at the markets. We had no experience, we had never made dumplings before. We were relying on YouTube and also my auntie, who had a Thai restaurant, so not a Chinese restaurant, but she made uh dim Sims. So we got her to make those for us, and we sold her dim sims. And then I also got her to custom make a vegetarian dumpling for us. Two of them actually. One was tofu and ginger, one was pumpkin and I think it was a pumpkin and red and curry dumpling, which I know sounds strange, but that was a huge seller. That was a hit. So was her tofu and ginger, actually. Even non-vegetarians loved that. And then our other dumplings, we just made up ourselves pork belly. Um, we had pork belly and bok choy, we had duck and I can't remember, but those those were two gourmet dumplings, and then we went to a yamcha restaurant and we asked if we could bulk buy some of their prawn dumplings, and so we got we had those as well. So I think we started with about six dumplings, and we go to the markets, no idea what we're doing, but what we did have was very cute branding, very cute brand personality. Again, very clear on our positioning. We didn't want to be for those, you know, we didn't want to be the same as what was already out there, the Chinatown, the Sunny Banks. We wanted to actually bring dumplings to the mainstream. We wanted to make it cute, we wanted to make it friendly, we wanted people who had never maybe tried Yum Cha before or dumplings to come and try us out. So we called it Happy Little Dumplings. We had the cutest branding, everything was branded. Our brand had personality. We actually had little dumpling characters, and then every now and then, when we eventually had stores, we would do competitions where we would get our customers to draw a dumpling mascot and we would pick a winner and they would win something. So that brand was a lot of fun. And we ended up with I think it was around six or seven stores within the first two years. So we went from starting at the markets, no idea what we're doing, couldn't even put up our gazebo, knocking over other people's gazebos, not fully knocking them over, but knocking into other people's gazebos on the way through because we couldn't drive this huge trailer that we bought. And nearly setting our stand on fire the first time to having six or seven stores in the first year or two and really building a name for ourselves. People would line up down the street, people would talk about our dumplings, they would come in bulk buy them from us. It was a lot of fun. And when it's something that you wish existed and you're filling your own gap, it's very easy to talk to your buyers, it's very easy to connect with them, it's easy to make content, it's easy to write your website copy your emails because you are your buyer. So that's something very important to think about. If you know that you filled a gap because of your own needs, you are your customer, and that's what you want to speak to. Get out of AI, unless, of course, you're using Candy AI, which is trained very well with my methods. If you don't know what candy AI is, it's my AI tool that is my brain. My marketing brain, my brand brain, it knows my content, it knows my all of my content strategies, it knows years of how I think. So when you use candy AI, it's essentially like you're you've got a 24-7 mentor in your pocket and you're talking to me. Those who have used it are blown away how much it actually talks and thinks like me. So unless you're using Candy AI for your content, don't use, don't rely on AI, please. Use your own voice. Speak like the person who wished that thing existed and what would she have been looking for? Speak to that directly. I'm going to finish this episode up for today. But like I said, if you want to hear more of my business stories, let me know and I'll keep going on the next episode. I also want to let you know that I have the Founder Runway coming up on the 15th of June. So if you're listening to this before the 15th of June and you don't have a business yet, but you would love to start your own business, that's exactly what the Founder Runway is for. You're going to come in with me for four weeks. We have our own Telegram chat group. We have weekly calls, and I'm going to help you come up with the perfect concept for your business. If you've got an idea that you want to bring to life, I will help you map out the steps to bring that to life. I'll also give you ideas for digital and physical products and how to find those and how to create a brand that you fall in love with yourself as well, and how to make sure that when you bring that brand to market, it connects and other people also feel in love with it. Also, on top of that, I'm giving you access to my signature course, Abricad Abri You're a Boss, which you can watch on the side as well. And that's actually the physical steps to here's how you start your brand, here's how you build your community, here's how you build your Shopify website, here's how you hype your launch. So if you are interested in that, I'm going to put in the show notes a very special offer link for you, which is 50% off. And this is only valid if you're listening to the potty. So if you would like to join the founder runway, link is in the show notes. Come and jump in with me. I can't wait to get started. It's I haven't done a course like this with early stage founders or pre-revenue pre-idea founders in years. So I'm really excited to do this because the demand was there, people kept asking, so I thought, alright, it's time to run another one. I have no plans to do this again anytime soon. So if this is what you want to do, this is your time to jump in. Okay, I will talk to you on the next episode.