Our motto, "If you love your food, give it a hug" comes from a passionate desire to help people enjoy their food as much as possible. This passion is shared by Michelle Ivankovic and Adrienne McNicholas who first launched the Food Huggers on Kickstarter over a year ago.
The campaign was embraced and supported by over 5,400 individuals, raising more than $183,497 in just 30 days. Thanks to the success of the campaign, they are now available to everyone on FoodHuggers.com (via Shopify!) Food Huggers wrap (hug) your leftover fruits and veggies to keep them fresh until you need them next time. Less wasted food is more fresh and healthy food enjoyed by your family. These reusable silicone covers reduce the need for plastic film, tin foil or baggies, all of which end up in landfills.
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
Our first sales were our Kickstarter backers. In December of 2013 we opened our Shopify store to sell to the public for our first Christmas as an e-retailer! Our customers and their enthusiasm are the biggest source of new customers for us. They love Food Huggers and tell everyone they know! We also get great traffic from blogs and media who have highlighted our new food saver innovations.
Tell us about the back-end of your business. What tools and apps do you use to run your store? How do you handle shipping and fulfillment?
In just 90 days we were able to collect more than 200 reviews via Yotpo and they are almost all wonderfully positive and super enthusiastic.
We have also used the Facebook to have a direct shop available to our 7,400 Facebook fans and found a very helpful contact on Fiverr who helps us adjust and program our liquid files when we need changes or tweaks to a template that is too complicated for us to do ourselves.
The ubiquity of Shopify makes it a great tool because there are so many apps and other resources ready to integrate with the Shopify system.
What are your top recommendations for new ecommerce entrepreneurs?
Start with a basic template and learn the system for a week or two before you customize your "look" too much. In the beginning every day brings a new lesson and a new detail or tweak. You will save time and money if you do tweaks in beta right off the template (there are so many to choose from) and then customize.