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Lessons learned selling 15,000 sunglasses
2 years ago, I started Woodify (E-commerce store selling Wooden Sunglasses) together with Robert as a side-project. Not in the craziest dream we could have thought that right now 15,000 people would be walking around The Netherlands with our sunglasses.
We made tons of mistakes running Woodify, and more than once people asked me to share all the things I learned.
Some of this could come across as dogmatic or hollow. Even so, it would have made a lot of difference for me if I would have known these things 2 years ago.
1. Starting an ecommerce store is probably one of the best schools to learn about business.
While doing e-commerce, you have to deal with almost every part of business. From finance to logistics, from managing your employees to managing your IT infrastructure. Those taxes don’t file themselves, and legal issues don’t disappear magically.
The great advantage is that it’s all really lean and there’s a lot of failure-tolerance. Since the only real costs you face are directly related to sales, you almost cannot go into debts unless you are selling below the cost-price. Therefore you can gain experience on all these important facets of running a company, in a damage-tolerant environment that can easily scale when you are good at what you do.
2. It all starts with customers. No matter what you do.
Earning direct money may not be the only indicator of success anymore (Take Twitter for example), but it is one of the most vital parts for every businesses. I mean, if customers don’t want to pay a penny for your services, you’re probably not that valuable to them, are you?
Making customers happy should be the most important goal of every company, because only happy customers will pay you, and only with money you can use the resources you need to grow your company.
At Woodify, we really sucked at this in the beginning. In our second week already, we sold over 100 sunglasses per day. It would be foolish to even think that we were able to deliver all those orders on time, and we definitely failed at that. However, we found out that delivering sunglasses wasn’t the most important part. Managing expectations is.
We did a really terrible job on managing expectations, and that led to many angry customers. And they did scream their feelings on the internet. This costed us 100s of orders, and thousands of euros. Make sure keeping your customers happy is priority #1. Many other good things will follow from that.
3. Have fun
This is probably where it all comes down to. We humans are not as rational as we like to believe. When running a company — or doing anything at all in life — you need to perform at your maximum to succeed.
Right now, there are 20 other companies in The Netherlands also selling wooden sunglasses. In general, it is extremely likely that you are not the only one going after your specific target. Almost every company has competition. In order to beat that competition, you need to deliver your best game, you need to perform at your absolute maximum.
The only way you can really get your brain & body to give the maximum they got, is to like what you do. Therefore, if you want to be really good at something, make sure you love doing it. Otherwise, you will never ever be really good at it. Make sure you love what you do.
4. Have clear goals
While running a company, there are many things that can be interesting to focus on. While we were selling Wooden Sunglasses in The Netherlands, it was very tempting to start selling sunglasses in other companies. But selling glasses to stores so they could resell our brand was also very interesting. Or expanding our collection of sunglasses. Or selling other wooden products. Selling customizable sunglasses.
Truth is, when you try to do all those things, you will likely fail at every single one of them. This is as true for companies, as it is for life. Focus on a very few very important goals, and be the very best at them.
5. Never walk alone
We are with 6 billion other humans on this planet. One of the greatest things about humanity is that we are all different and have our own specific talents. But we also have our weaknesses, so you probably are not that capable at all different aspects of running a business. Thus one of the best things you should to in order to bring your idea a step closer to reality, is finding like-minded people who want to walk with you on your journey.
6. Friends
Running a company should soak up loads of time. If it doesn’t, it probably means that you aren’t putting enough energy and passion in it. And that means that your company will never be the best. However, putting most of your time awake in a company really is a sacrifice which isn’t easy to make. It is much easier if you work all-day together with friends than doing so all on your own.
7. Keep learning
1995, just 20 years ago. Almost no-one had a mobile phone, and having internet access in your home was certainly not very common. Who would have imagined that right now, just 20 years later, we would be so dependant on the internet and our phones? We use the internet to share our entire lives, to order our food, and to manage our financials.
This is just a small example of how fast our world changes. Wisdom you have right now, may not be so useful 10 years from now, or even next year. But there are so many great resources out there on the internet. You can learn everything about almost anything on websites you can find within seconds.
If you want to stay the best, you got to keep on learning, and learning, and learning. Like Elon Musk once said: “I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”
8. Take risks
Risks are something fascinating. We humans are wired to love safety. Why would you leave your steady job to work on a startup, while not even knowing whether it will be a succes? Actually, the chance that a startup will ever make serious money, is around 5%. So you must be crazy to think that your startup will be amongst that 5%, right?
There are two things worth noting here: The first comes from statistics. The Law of Big Numbers states that if you repeat an experiment (like starting a startup) very often, you will reach every possible outcome. So the only thing you really need to do to start the next billion-$$-business, is to keep trying.
The second reason is to define what you truly want to achieve.
The only way to ever do things that are truly innovating, is by failure. If you don’t fail along the road, it probably means that it isn’t really innovating.
So just try (and fail)! If you try enough, you have to be succesfull according to statistics. And without trying a lot, you will never do anything truly impactful.
I believe these 8 points are vital for any company. I learned them the hard way, they are here for you so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel! I love to hear questions & feedback. You can tweet me or send an e-mail to bastiaan@woodify.nl. Enjoy :-)!
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