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Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

• robertk 8y ago
  I am glad that the advice is not unusual and refers to the usual suspects: judicious A/B testing of SEO keywords, personalized correspondence with early customers, and leveraging media and coaches. It gives confidence that anyone can do this.
  • fridaysoff 8y ago
    Thanks! I'm just a regular person trying to make a go at my own thing because the corporate world just wasn't for me. My goal is to help people realize that if they have a dream they should go for it, but also to realize that it doesn't come easy. It's A LOT of work!!
• sdenton4 8y ago
  Beware. There's a whole lot of "start an e shop and get rich quick" bullshit out there. https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/117-the-worlds-most-expensive-free-watch#episode-player https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/117-the-worlds-most-ex...
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • thecatspaw 8y ago
    > "PJ: That is the one thing that actually makes it look slightly scammy... like Nike's not like we just sold a pair of sneakers." I do have to disagree on this. This is them trying to increase the "social proof", proof that you are making a solid choice in buying this item. Nike doesnt need to do this because everybody knows nike, and feels that they are good shoes worth their money. Showing proof of other purchases increases that proof, and you are more inclined to buy it. Of course this all assumes legit "soAndSo bought it too" messages
    • Splines 8y ago
      > Of course this all assumes legit "soAndSo bought it too" messages And this is why I would never trust such messages. It's way too easy to fake it, and too much work to make it real, and there's no way for customers to verify it's real anyway.
      • matte_black 8y ago
        Doesn’t matter. If it pops up you still have to actively remind yourself not to trust it to be immune to it’s effect.
  • fabricexpert 8y ago
    This is different though - the gimlet podcast is about dropshipping, where you don't keep inventory and are literally just creating a sales pipeline for someone else, and absorbing all of the marketing costs (hint: why would a manufacturer / wholesaler let you do this for them if it was profitable?). In this case you're entering the supply chain of a product (cut fabric), which end customers cannot do for themselves and wholesalers cannot scale.
    • swalsh 8y ago
      "(hint: why would a manufacturer / wholesaler let you do this for them if it was profitable?)." Wayfair is a 9.7B company, that dropships. They found a way to make it profitable.
  • toomanybeersies 8y ago
    I got down to where he said he paid $10 for shipping and instantly clicked that it was a watch from Aliexpress and it was a classic dropshipping gig. There were some people a few years ago that managed to sell off a few hundred Hawaiian shirts that were most likely drop shipped from China by using some well targeted FB (and probably Instagram) advertising, and giving the shirts funny names (named after local alcoholic drinks). They were probably making $20 or $30 per shirt. An interesting take on the Aliexpress game is theive.co [1]. It's basically a curated list of stuff on Aliexpress with referral links. Since I last looked at the website they've apparently launched a product aimed at drop shippers, where you can get market insights. Morally it's murky, but it's clever. [1] https://thieve.co/ https://thieve.co/
    • chatmasta 8y ago
      > Morally it's murky, but it's clever. No offense, but this is the kind of thinking that holds back people from succeeding in business. I see it a lot from non-biz engineering types. There is nothing, nothing “morally wrong” with dropshipping. The main value you provide is discoverability; if the customer finds a product through you that they would not have found otherwise, then you added value. Also, you provide customer service and return policies that the supplier may not. Finally, you also provide value to the supplier by selling their merchandise in channels they are unable or unwilling to reach. In fact, all that really matters is that the customer made a voluntary decision to purchase a product from you, and was not misinformed about the terms of purchase or shipping. You are under no obligation to inform the customer of your suppliers. If you disagree morally with that, then feel free to link them to a site where they can buy your product from someone else. The idea that there is something “wrong” with selling a product for more than you pay for it is ridiculous, at best. That is literally what business has meant since the dawn of civilization.
      • stickfigure 8y ago
        Having been in the (software side of the) digital marketing business for a few years, I generally agree with you. On the other hand, there are some complaints you can level at the industry. One is that they're exploiting an information asymmetry between the buyer and the seller; buyers as of yet haven't realized just how cheap and available things are on Aliexpress, and the sellers do their best to hide the source of goods. I think this will resolve itself over time as buyers get more savvy. There are also some questionable practices. "Free, you just pay [$10+] shipping" seems aimed at some sort of psychological defect in the part of the human brain that calculates value. And digital marketers often are often rather indifferent to IP rights. I guess my biggest complaint is that there are an awful lot of online marketers that really just don't seem to care all that much about the customer. They're often selling one-time impulse buys which are priced too low to be worth the trouble to return and they don't expect a repeat customer, ever. They've never even seen the products they're selling. I guess I want a little more value-add from my vendors - I've gone back to buying things offline where I can. (I'm sure the article author is in a very different category of seller, which is heartwarming!)
  • swalsh 8y ago
    This episode only looked at one side of the business. There is a "legitimate" side of dropshipping, and there's the get rich quick, then die side of drop shipping. To dropship "for real" you need to build actual relationships with suppliers who are typically in the states. The margins are paper thin, and they're not very tech savvy most of the time. You typically have to prove yourself. Dropshippers provide real value. Good dropshippers are marketing experts. They build good customer relationships. It's a legitimate business. But getting into it is A LOT harder today. Consumer habits are different.
• joelhaasnoot 8y ago
  My wife runs a small little shop in the creative space too: the margins can be quite high for nice, high quality stuff and customers are easy to draw in for multiple purchases. (also it helps I do the tech side of things and there is so much open source, free or cheap stuff available tech-wise)
  • throwawaylalala 8y ago
    The danger here is that it's easy to get sucked into doing tech stuff, and not focusing on directly revenue generating things. I see so many people spinning their wheels with "free" things when low cost subscriptions would save them hours and hours and hours of effort.
    • joelhaasnoot 8y ago
      We use Woocommerce and have definitely bought a few plugins. A lot of them are free however and quite good.
  • bluedino 8y ago
    A friend of mine's wife started a very high margin business selling scrapbook grabbags on eBay. She'd buy up clearance items and local craft/hobby stores, and bundle them up to sell on eBay. She made enough money that after two months, PayPal came along and froze her accounts, cutting her cashflow off, effectively killing the business.
    • JackFr 8y ago
      > She made enough money that after two months, PayPal came along and froze her accounts What does that mean?
      • lobotryas 8y ago
        It means that PayPal (incorrectly) suspected her of fraud and took her money (froze her accounts). If this all sounds weird to you then you should search for more info because PayPal loves screwing over sellers on their platform. Alternatively, she could have had a wrong account type (personal instead of business), but my charitable assumption is that GP took care of that.
• emilfihlman 8y ago
  >After returning from a year long maternity leave I found it difficult to juggle my new life as a mom working in the confines of a 9-5, I also came to the realization that the corporate life just wasn’t for me and became very unhappy. I was tired of faking it and really just wanted to follow my forever dream of doing my own thing and being my own boss. So, I did what anyone would do in that situation and got pregnant again ;) ... Knowing I had another year-long maternity leave on the horizon, I started brainstorming e-comm business ideas. This doesn't sound good, basically kickstarting a company on another company's money.
  • giarc 8y ago
    Maternity leave benefits in Canada are paid by the federal government through Employment Insurance (EI) program. New parents get 12-18 months of EI payments. Your employer is only required to hold a position for you, they are not obligated to pay your wage.
    • emilfihlman 8y ago
      Ah, that's good to know because in Finland, your employer does pay it.
      • a_brawling_boo 8y ago
        Hey, serious question from an American. How does this policy not cause massive hiring discrimination against young women, especially recently married women? I asked my Canadian relatives this question, and their answers basically boiled down to 'well that would be illegal'. But from what I can tell enforcing anti discrimination in hiring is next to impossible, especially if you interview and hire even a slightly more qualified candidate.
        • giarc 8y ago
          I would argue that it's not the law that's preventing discrimination, it's the fact that nearly 50% of the workforce is made up of women, thereby excluding a huge category is detrimental to your business. You wouldn't be a very good manager if you decided not to hire women because one day they might take a year off. Additionally, many managers are probably also parents themselves and understand the importance of maternity leave and understand it's part of having a workforce. Plus, in my department, we actually see the benefit of maternity leaves. We get to hire a new person for a year that can bring new insight and experience into the role. If they are good, we try to find a place for them, if they are bad, the year expires and they go off without any fanfare.
• subpixel 8y ago
  “Knowing I had another year-long maternity leave on the horizon...” said no American, ever.
  • wheaties 8y ago
    Seems like damned near every other non-third world country gets it...
    • msaharia 8y ago
      Not just non-third world countries. I think US stands rather uniquely when it comes to holidays and maternity leave. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/parliament-passes-bill-to-raise-maternity-leave-to-26-weeks/articleshow/57565644.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/parliament-passes-...
  • hippich 8y ago
    Looks like there are about 10m women staying at home with kids - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/number-of-stay-at-home-mothers-in-us-rises.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/number-of-stay-at-home... I wonder how many of them doing such businesses, and how many could engage in such businesses, and if they do not want to do it - why.
    • subpixel 8y ago
      Maternity leave is generally paid. Parenting is not.
      • hippich 8y ago
        I am interested only in ones, who already stay at home.
  • JackFr 8y ago
    Is using a year long maternity leave to start a business an argument for extended maternity leaves?
• codingdave 8y ago
  Note that she did something good from the very start - Solved a problem: "People were tired of paying high shipping rates from online fabric shops in the US and wanted to shop Canadian." Find a problem. Build a solution. Market it. Listen to your customers. It is fairly standard advice, but it works well.
• Descartes1 8y ago
  I've always hated the concept of "revenues" in commerce. Honestly, who cares what your revenues are? Profits are all that matters.
  • fabricexpert 8y ago
    Depends on scale and runway. If you have 200k/month in revenue you can easily make (or lose) a boat load of money with a few small adjustments to your margins.
    • ComputerGuru 8y ago
      > easily Citation needed. Because everyone else would be doing it if that were true. It’s certainly possible, but not by any means “easy.”
    • fukuro 8y ago
      Every month I buy a Ferrari for 250,000 en sell it for 200,000. I can now make a blogpost and say I have a revenue of 200,000/month. Revenue alone is not a valid metric.
      • wordythebyrd 8y ago
        Genius, time to profit. /s
  • Afton 8y ago
    I don't think that's true. If you have revenue from thousands of purchases, and lots of revenue, you have an avenue to reduce costs as your pipeline matures. It's not the only number you should care about, but it's hardly a who-cares item.
    • ademup 8y ago
      I respectfully disagree. Without context, revenue by itself is less than 'who cares', it can be something of a damaging number in the sense that it can lead financially illiterate people astray.
• Descartes1 8y ago
  Revenues are irrelevant. Profits aren't.
  • bjoerns 8y ago
    Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash is reality.
  • mikec3010 8y ago
    This is a really ignorant thing to say. If you have a hearty revenue stream but no profit, you can tweak the model to make it profitable. Some profits aren't possible at small scales, so having revenue proves you have demand and can lead to safely risking big bucks to get to a profitable scale.
    • vageli 8y ago
      > If you have a hearty revenue stream but no profit, you can tweak the model to make it profitable. I don't think this necessarily follows.
    • swalsh 8y ago
      Especially in the eCommerce business where you might have a deal with a supplier. It's not unusual to be able to negotiate a higher margin the more you sell. Any single financial metric alone cannot tell the whole story of a business. Revenues are equally as important as profits.
  • mkirklions 8y ago
    Yep, this is a reoccurring problem on his blog. Low quality interviews and articles. I believe he has lots of accounts to upvote, otherwise this would be hidden.
  • patwalls 8y ago
    It's not so black and white. They are both valuable. However, sharing revenue is a consistent theme of my website, like IH. If you read more into the many interviews I've done - you can find many founders talking about profits/margin.
• fabricexpert 8y ago
  I run an almost identical fabric shop online. 20k/month revenue is great but remember this is not a SaaS with unlimited scale and low costs. It's actually a very traditional business model, and margins here are only going to about 20-30%, potentially a lot less if you have to pay for your storage space. You buy the fabric, typically you'll double the price when selling to customers. Then you take off additional postage fees/packaging (note the flat fees on postage), payment fees (3-4%), discounts, returns, shopify monthly fees, accounting software etc. You'll spend about 50% of your day cutting & packing orders, taking them to the post office etc. (or you can employ someone to help) and the rest of the time taking shots for instagram, sourcing new suppliers, working on SEO/blogging and doing admin. If you're good at marketing you can shift quite a lot of fabric, but it will take you about a year to get your stock levels up to a sustainable amount to pay yourself a wage. If you want a real shop front you will generate most of your profit from running classes as the costs for a high street store are significantly higher than shopify and you gain little in terms of footfall vs online traffic. This isn't a get rich quick model but over time it works well and is replicable at scale.
  • anoncoward111 8y ago
    Nice, thanks for the numbers! At a certain point you start competing with Home Depot, Michaels, Walmart, Amazon, whoever. You are in the product retail business, rather than the manufacturing or services business. I think if you get really good at streamlining your marketing (Instagram photos and landing pages) as well as your pick/pack/ship operations (i.e running a warehouse), then you can expand into multiple niches. Fabrics, clothes, prints, whatever is super niche and high margin and can't be found on the shelves of a big box store.
    • fabricexpert 8y ago
      You can also move up the supply chain into the wholesale or even raw materials business (but you need more capital here) or down into actually manufacturing bespoke/custom items (but that's hard to scale). Ultimately I think you need to actually be passionate about the product you're selling and embrace the community around it.
    • 8y ago
• deleted 8y ago
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• ed 8y ago
  Nice interview! FYI the learn more links at the bottom are broken.
  • patwalls 8y ago
    Thanks! Fixed.
• mkirklions 8y ago
  Pat, you should be marking your topics as Show HN: Promotion of your blog should be clear to readers.
  • chatmasta 8y ago
    So nobody can submit their own content unless it has a Show HN on it? Come on that’s ridiculous. Also, “Show HN” is specifically for products we can play with after clicking the link. Please do not pollute Show HN with blogposts; I will flag them and I’m sure others will too.
    • mkirklions 8y ago
      Maybe this is just spam then
      • patwalls 8y ago
        Why are you so adamant that my website is spam? You've made multiple comments about it. I spend a lot of time on it and it provides a lot of value to a lot of people. Maybe the content is not super relevant to you and that's fine. You don't have to read it. Why are you leaving so many comments about this?
  • DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they can't be Show HNs. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
• MrRubbish 8y ago
  > beautifully curated modern fabrics. Surely beautiful fabrics and not beautiful curation. Of course, I could be wrong. So this is mark-up and ship?
• fridaysoff 8y ago
  Hi! It's Alanna Banks, found of Fridays Off. Thank you for reading my story and all the comments below. I haven't had a chance to read them yet, but I'm going to run through them now. Please feel free to reach out to me with questions. :)
  • wordythebyrd 8y ago
    Thanks for sharing your story!
  • ddevjani 8y ago
    Hey Alanna! LOVING your story. its so genuine and raw. it shows that it isn't easy and persistence + constantly learning are key. I'd love to host you on a podcast series I've started specifically focused on bootstrapped founders, starting side-hustles, and their stories of the early days. Even though your post answers most of them, hearing them from you would be fantastic. let me know if that'd be of interest. Sending lots of good vibes, and telling my north-of-the-border -mom-friends about FridaysOff!
    • fridaysoff 8y ago
      Hi! Sure I would be happy to do an interview. :) And thanks for spreading the word :)
• _salmon 8y ago
  What seems to work for me is getting the write keywords in my meta description lel
  • snarf21 8y ago
    big funny, much laugh!
  • fridaysoff 8y ago
    LOL
• NinaJZapala 8y ago
  This is so awesome!
• tomcam 8y ago
  Very cool story. One of my favorite stores is Britax in San Francisco, where you can see fabrics going north of $1,000/yard. She doesn't seem to use Pinterest, which seems like a natural fit.
  • fridaysoff 8y ago
    I know. I need to get moving on Pinterest. It's a total fit.
  • amorphid 8y ago
    I was about to tell you that Britex had gone out of business, but I fortunately for you they've simply moved from Geary to Post :)
• profalseidol 8y ago
  This to me is almost not a hacker news.