I thought I would spend a bit of time writing about how my business got up and running, along with sharing some hints and tips.
I started thinking about getting my business up and running over 7 years ago. It took a long time in the planning, I suppose I could have set it up then but I really wanted to find out all the information I could before jumping in head first. 7 years may be a little excessive in the planning process, however, it means that I am now 100% sure about where I want my business to end up and what I want out of it. Needless to say that now that I have my business, nothing has really worked to plan.
First things first, in order to have a business you need a product or service... luckily, I knew what my passion was and why I wanted to get into the market that I am in but some people don't and I would suggest rather than just going for anything, you go for something that you have and interest in as this will keep you motivated. Also, don't spread yourself too thin, make sure that what you have works before you move on to other ventures.
Right, now that I know what I am going to be offering I need a business name. This was for me a really difficult one. I am selling lingerie, I needed a name that I could use going forward, what I mean by this is that at the moment I am selling just lingerie and Hoisery, but going forward I would like to move into swimwear and therefore don't want to limit the use of my name.
Some of my previous thoughts were:
Fifi's - named after me, but sounded completely wrong for the business
Cup Cake - so small and cute, yet with a little bit of wicked... Already Taken
aBRAcadaBRA - One that a friend of mine came up with - I didn't look any further into this
Titholdersareus - One that my father came up with - agian not one that I looked into.
Then there were hundereds of names that I came up with that were already taken... it is worth noting, that you don't just want to check that the domain name is available, you also need to check Companies House to see if there is a limited company out there with the same name
http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/ and the Patent Office for trademarks
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/tm/t-applying/t-before/t-already.htm to make sure that you are not treading on toes.
Once you have a name, get your domain and make sure that your e-mails go to a dedicated e-mail address relating to that site a hotmail account just doesn't cut the mustard.
So you now have your domain and your ready to role onto a website....
Not yet, what about products, I was looking at these long in advance, but until I was ready to go I didn't want to comit to anything. I decided to go wholesale as I could not find a reliable dropshipper that did the sort of products I was after... I did speak to a few dropshippers and did my research online, however still managed to get stung by one of them, luckily it was a test purchase so didn't upset any customers.
Dropshipping - this is a nice way to get products without having to spend a small fortune upfront, you are able to test the market and see what sells and what doesn't, but as I haven't gone down this route, I don't want to talk about it too much incase I say the wrong thing, so maybe someone else out there can give us more of the pro's and con's about dropshipping.
Wholesale - this is the route that I took. by going wholesale you will find that your start up costs are vastly larger that the dropshipping route. Certainly for my line of business, all suppliers have an initial order amount which means that even before you start selling you have to buy the stock in and initial order amounts are not small. So as I stand I have about £5,500 worth of stock and don't know if it is all going to sell, plus don't forget about space, where are you going to store it all? I certainly don't have the space at home, luckily, my father has a shop which has a bit of spare space - created by me rearranging his whole stock room so I don't have to spend money on storage costs.
So, I now know that my products are on there way, I can start setting up my website. There are so many different options out there, you just need to try out the demo's and see if you like what they have to offer. I think I tried about 10 different e-commerce solutions before I chose my one, however, I am now finding that the theming is a bugger... it should be easy but it does funny things, for example, I recently added a line of code so that at the bottom of my site I had Upfront (from the find) this however affected the site by removing all of my product descriptions... no idea as to why or how it managed that, but little adjustments to code really can make a huge difference.
Whilst getting your website up and running make sure it is legal... yes that means research, you thought you had done plenty of that making sure that you were getting in the right products and checking out which e-commerce solution to use, but research never ever stops.
Other points to consider and research whilst setting up your website are:
Payment Solutions i.e paypal, google checkout, worldpay, nochex etc
Where you images are going to come from
Making sure you are not infringing copyright
Keywords and SEO
All of these require lots and lots of research
Anyway, In October 2009 at last my business was live online... I was a very happy bunny, I still needed to source some more products but atleast I was live.
I then decided to add to my product range and purchased from Belgium. Belgium have a VAT rate of 21% so if I wasn't VAT registered I couldn't possibly be competative, so VAT registration had to come into play. Being VAT registered has worked out well for me, as I am still building up the business, I am buying in/spending more than I am selling and therefore not paying the VAT man much, and infact my last VAT return was a nice little refund. However, being VAT registered meant that Lemon Blossom had to become a limited company (not what I had planned for) but this was soley due to the fact that I am self-employed and therefore I would have to charge VAT on the services I offered as well as anything being sold through Lemon Blossom, I couldn't afford to do this so Limited Company was my only option.
Now, as you can see above I spent a lot of money getting in stock that I didn't know would sell, that didn't phase me at all, but becoming VAT registered and Limited suddenly scared me, it was now all official, I now have real deadlines to stick to.
There is so much more, but I feel I have waffled on long enough, as things progess and other hurdles come along I will share them with you so that you can perhaps learn from all of my mistakes...
So to sum up.... My business was a long time in the planning... nothing really went to plan... my site still isn't fully themed... I am still learning and researching and learning and researching... I am making sales and moving up the google ranking, but I plan to take my time doing this as I want it to be long term so I need sturdy foundations. I hope this has been of some use to others.
Author
