Company name:
The company name is 4little1s.com
Location:
Surrey, UK
Your name:
Christianne James
What does your company do? :
We run an online business selling a wide variety of exciting and interesting baby gifts for little ones. Our unique product, are the handmade and painted wooden plaques, which are made exclusively for us and no one else, as my cousin in California does these for me as her hobby
What’s its annual income?
Having just started up, its early days but we are approaching approximately £15k pa. This goes towards paying for our children’s school fees
When did you start?
We had been talking about it around the kitchen table roughly 18 months ago, however the company officially started 1 year ago
What were you doing before?
I worked in London for a large Bank and then left to have children.
What made you think of this idea?
Being at home while the children were at school I noticed I had a number of hours per day that could be used to bring some income in and help pay for school fees. Trying to buy a really unique or different baby gift for a friend was proving very difficult as I bounced from website to website and even venturing down the high street didn’t help much. Its then I thought of the idea of having a baby gift website providing a wide variety of gifts and using my own artistic flair as well as well as my cousins. Having two young children also meant that I needed to have a business that gave me flexibility.
How many people work in the business?
My husband and myself run the business day to day wise and usually most evenings after putting the children to bed involves catching up with paperwork, ordering stock and preparing goods for dispatch. My cousin works a few hours a week in terms of the wooden plaques and other general duties
Do they work form your home or their own?
My husband has a fulltime job working in IT in London and works most evenings and weekends for the business at home. I work for the business fulltime at home
How did you finance the start up?
My husband lent the business all the startup funds fortunately so we didn’t need to approach a bank except for a business account.
Have you had to refinance?
We have not needed to refinance as the terms my husband provided are very favorable.
What next?
Now the baby gift business has been established and we have fine tuned a number of the original processes that we set up, the next step will probably be to move into a number of craft and gift fairs. We have tested the water on a number of these over the last 12 months and all of them have proved successful and profitable.
What tip would you pass on to other home business owners?
‘Stickability’ is absolutely key. There have been many times where we have been working until 2 or 3 in the morning, putting orders together and catching up generally. At the time it’s easy to forget the bigger picture of what you are trying to achieve and give up too soon. Keep going as it’s worth it in the end and very rewarding when you take a step back and look at what’s been achieved.
http://www.4little1s.com is our website and should you want any baby gifts or want to know what a Deglingo is.......visit us.
Monday, 29 December 2008
E marketing from 4little1s.com
www.4little1s.com - E-marketing
We use an off the shelf email marketing and contact management system called Constant Contact. We try to keep our customers updated monthly with new product lines as well as any discounts and special offers that come up during the year. An absolutely critical component to any E-marketing campaign for us has to be the ability for a subscriber to opt out as easily and quickly as possible.
From experience, we have been very frustrated with sites that make you sign in and select features and offers that you do not want to receive anymore. For our marketing, we make it as simply and easy as possible for people to opt in and of course out….no questions asked.
The second element to any campaign has to be the ability to measure the results of the campaign, not just over the course of a week or a month but an ongoing exercise of fine tuning, learning what works well and produced results and what doesn’t. We increased our response rate significantly when we included a call to action prompt of a voucher code which had an urgency to it.
4little1s.com is an online baby gifts website and can be found at http://www.4little1s.com selling a wide variety of gifts such as Deglingoes and other baby and children soft toys
We use an off the shelf email marketing and contact management system called Constant Contact. We try to keep our customers updated monthly with new product lines as well as any discounts and special offers that come up during the year. An absolutely critical component to any E-marketing campaign for us has to be the ability for a subscriber to opt out as easily and quickly as possible.
From experience, we have been very frustrated with sites that make you sign in and select features and offers that you do not want to receive anymore. For our marketing, we make it as simply and easy as possible for people to opt in and of course out….no questions asked.
The second element to any campaign has to be the ability to measure the results of the campaign, not just over the course of a week or a month but an ongoing exercise of fine tuning, learning what works well and produced results and what doesn’t. We increased our response rate significantly when we included a call to action prompt of a voucher code which had an urgency to it.
4little1s.com is an online baby gifts website and can be found at http://www.4little1s.com selling a wide variety of gifts such as Deglingoes and other baby and children soft toys
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