Supporting a Passion Project

Over the past six months, I have been supporting my partner, Laurel, as she develops a vintage store on Etsy (100 Percent That Vintage). She has always had a passion for vintage fashion, and she knew she wanted to share that enthusiasm, particularly with plus sized people who are a chronically underserved market. I offered my support, and I've taken some lessons away from the experience.

• It starts when you start: After much deliberation on names and branding, her store went up in November. Suddenly, what had been just an idea was tangible and we had a place to work from.
• Make it social: Having a new etsy store feels like having a sad little kiosk in the back of a flea market. For the first month, we didn't see any traffic. In December, we went from posting clothes against a white back drop to spending hours shooting Laurel wearing the clothes, and posting them on Instagram and facebook. We started to see views grow, and soon we started making our first sales.
• Make it personal: As sales started to become regular, Laurel knew she would live and die by the reviews people left. She began including a hand written thank you note in each shipment. She also started carefully wrapping each item in tissue paper so that he "unboxing" moment would be more special. The result was more than 50% of customers leaving reviews.
• Ads Work: By using the advertising features of Etsy, Facebook and Instagram we started to grow the number of followers across all three platforms. We consistently saw sales follow directly every time we ran an ad campaign.
• Create a Work Flow: Laurel has always loved shopping at thrift stores, but developing the discipline to buy -> clean -> steam -> shoot -> post was new muscle. New merchandise is the engine that brings customers back, and finding a fast and consistent way to make that inventory available has been key.

I'm sure nothing here is particularly revelatory, but having spent my career at Fortune 500 companies and contracting for the DOE, it has been an absolute joy to wear the Marketing, Book Keeping, Operations and Sales hat all at once. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that when the resume of small business owners come by, I'll bring them to the top of the stack.