Origins #40 — November at DULO HQ

What we’ve been up to

Published in

The Needle

3 min readDec 6, 2017

In our previous post we shared how we think about discounts and weighing long-term vision vs short-term wins. In this post, I’ll be less philosophical and just share what we’ve been up to for the past week.

Digital marketing partner

As we shared in previous vlog and blog, we were looking for a digital marketing partner to take care of our Facebook and Instagram ad efforts. We talked with a few agencies not based in the Netherlands, just to gather a general sense of the landscape, but in the back of our minds, ideally, we wanted someone local (preferably, not an agency) that we could work with and that’s exactly what we found.

So, from this week, we will be starting to setup campaigns, create ad creatives, do keyword and competitor research, as well as look into audiences and start testing.

Hanze University project

Marin, being an alumni of Hanze University, managed to arrange us to be the client for the Online Branding course. 2 classes in the first year of their studies, 5 teams of 5 people each.

Their task for the upcoming 9 weeks will be to think about ideas and ways of how we can communicate the brand and visual values of DULO online.

Instagram efforts

This was kind of a revelation week in terms of how to use the platform. We managed to get nearly 2/3 of the results in a week, compared to what we did since starting to use it, a few months ago. We were way tot occupied with creating and putting out content, but completely misjudged the value of consuming other people’s content and engaging with it. Instagram will be a key platform for us, due to the visual nature of our product, so we will be sure to double down on our newly found working strategy.

Besides engaging with other people’s content, for the first time in our presence on Insta, we are putting a lot more effort in visuals + storytelling, making our feed pleasant to look at, compared to the more raw “documenting” approach we had previously.

Expect a separate blog post on the topic, once we solidify that this approach is fruitful, so we can share some experience and hopefully help some folks with their Instagram initiatives.

New payment method — iDEAL

For all our Dutch friends, we now have iDeal as a payment method, to make your lives easier and save you … yes time :D

Not sure, if I mentioned it previously, but we also launched The Origins Black, both for men and women honoring Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, however without any discounts*.

A great month in terms of steps taken forward and momentum building.

If you have any comments, or notes on what I mentioned in this post, or what we’re doing in general, please share them in the comments, we look forward to engaging with as many people as possible!

Our vlog covering some of the mentioned topics:

Best,

Thank you for your time! Please give a few 👏 and/or leave a comment. It means a lot us and helps other people hear about our journey!