Fashion business: getting on the phone
This is already the second blog post for the Adam Berk’s experimental incubator that gives startups and entrepreneurs funding in exchange for testing and sharing lean-startup hypothesis. John Sechrest and Robert Filić are helped me to run this experiment. The link to my specific hypothesis on Trello: https://trello.com/c/xOt6ZLGW.
Background
My mother-in-law owns a fashion store in a big city but currently has some issues with sales. Well, just one issue — they are decreasing year-by-year. She’s quite old-fashioned business owner who pays more attention to the quality of the services and products rather than to marketing or customer development.
The customers’ database is in a perfect state, although it’s non-digitized. My mother-in-law for many years asks from new customers their size, mobile number, occupation, and birthday date. She’s also tracking all purchases and returns. Everything is hand-written in notepads, and there’s a pile of notepads with hundreds of records.
It was quite logical for me to help her with the customer development, and also to validate the hypothesis for my start-up at the same time. During the past week, I made around 120 calls which turned into just 50 conversations, and that is a threshold for the experiment.
EXPERIMENT
I THOUGHT that 10 out of 50 existing customers will agree to receive a newsletter and give their emails by 4th of March because they are the store’s loyal customers and interested in hearing relevant recommendations.
ACTUALLY, 21 out of 50 customers submitted for the newsletter and gave their emails during the interviews.
Findings and Conclusions
First finding is that I love #custdev more and more with every other experiment! Now I’m on a stage when I believe that I can improve 80% of other businesses in the city just by talking to their customers :-D
In the majority of the conversations people were kind and open. Those who refused to give their emails had following arguments: a) I live nearby / I visit the store very often; b) I follow the store’s Instagram / I visit the website; c) I don’t have an email.
Another very important finding is that there are many people who prefer WhatsApp / Viber as a main communication channel. This brings back on a table an initial idea with which we’ve started the journey — a chatbot.
In fact, I’m very satisfied with the results of this experiment and can’t wait to start another one. The goal of the next experiment is to prove that newsletter with a personalized offer will work better than newsletter with a generalized offer.
Adam’s funding could help us with a few very important things such as digitizing the customers database and continue the #custdev, hiring a photographer to shoot clothes in the store and supporting a stylist’s work to develop personalized offers.
The NEXT EXPERIMENT is submitted to the following Trello card: https://trello.com/c/LS3r3GtG
