Introduce your business and tell us your story: How did you decide on what to sell, and how did you source your products?
We designed the Slim Wallet for the person who hates schlepping around a bunch of unnecessary stuff in their pockets like cash, coins, receipts, and year-old loyalty cards.
We developed the design of our Slim Wallet locally in Minneapolis and did an initial production run in Chicago. Ultimately to scale the business we found a partner in China to meticulously craft our wallets in larger quantities.
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
We funded the launch of our company and the creation of our first run of Slim Wallets on Kickstarter through 6,237 people from over 70 countries all around the world.
It was an amazing experience where we gained many insights about our audience. Our Shopify site sees a lot of referral traffic from a variety of men's accessory review sites and also through word of mouth.
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?
Setting up a solid back-end for our business was critically important since we run our company from two different cities - San Francisco and Minneapolis. In addition to our Shopify ecommerce site, we use Asana for project management, HelpScout for customer support and the amazing team over at Shipwire for our product fulfillment.
What are your top recommendations for new store owners?
The one thing that has been an invaluable lesson is really taking the time to refine all the back-end systems and logistics to support your ecommerce site. Planning for crazy success when you open your online doors will make life much less stressful when things start to take off.