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Founder Interview: How I am Building A Brand Online and Offline
Launching a product involves a lot of planning. Galia Orme, founder of CHOC Chick methodically plans for setting up her business, launching her product and building the brand online and offline. She tells The NextWomen how she does it. Her tagline: Love Chocolate? Make Chocolate!
Learning about the retail buying process has been a huge learning curb for me. Getting a meeting with buyers and getting them to commit to ordering our Kits has been my biggest challenge.
How did you plan your Business Set up and Why ‘Raw Chocolate’? Aren’t their easier products to market?
I started working on CHOC Chick in April 2008 after leaving my job as Business Development Manager for an internet marketing agency in Brighton. I spent three months researching the product, sourcing the importers in the UK and making and developing raw chocolate recipes. As my background was in internet marketing, my first aim was to simply set up an online business.
I then spend 6 weeks doing market research, looking at what there was on the market at the time and analysing who was buying and who would be interested in buying raw chocolate products. It soon became clear that there was no raw chocolate making kit available that was accessible to the mainstream market.
Raw chocolate products were mainly sold online and in a number of health food and organic shops and was very specifically marketed as a vegetarian/vegan product.It was considered a rare and expensive product and the market for it was indeed quite limited. My aim became to make this product accessible to all and not limited to a specific raw food market.
How did you position your brand?
I enlisted the help of a fantastic branding expert and we identified how we could differentiate our product and developed a brand that we felt was authentic and would appeal to our main target market of women aged 30-55. This guided the development of our packaging, logos, straplines and ultimately our website/online shop which went live in September 2008.
I felt that the way to market our raw chocolate making kits was to position our chocolate making kits as an accessible, fun and new way of enjoying chocolate. We stress not only the healthy properties of unprocessed cacao but also the creative aspect of making and discovering new raw chocolate recipes.
As a completely new product on the market, it is potentially more difficult to promote and market raw chocolate making kits, however the chocolate and confectionary market is saturated with chocolatiers and new ready-made chocolate products so the fact that there is currently nothing like our product available has proved to be an advantage.
We seem to have entered this competitive market at a time where more and more people are into home baking and making their own food so an easy to make chocolate making kit that is also good for you seems to tick all the boxes.
Our main challenge is raising awareness of a completely new product and I’ve attended many food fairs, trade shows and retail outlets to demonstrate raw chocolate making. The good thing that we found is that once people see how easy it is to make raw chocolate and taste the chocolates made, they generally buy a CHOC Chick Kit for themselves or as a gift idea and spread our brand by word of mouth.
How did you form your team?
In the first year of business I did everything myself. By year two, I moved to a small shared warehouse and had part-time help to pack up the Kits and help out during food fairs. In year three, I outsourced all the packing and distribution to a dedicated company in Gatwick that deals with all my online and retail orders. Read more
Squid London: From Students to Female Founders of a Globally Recognized Innovative Brand.
The NextWomen Start-up Interview series looks at women that are founding and leading online businesses across a number of technological markets. We showcase the businesses of diverse female innovators, making them notable and quotable.
Whilst Emma-Jayne and Viviane Jaeger worked on a joint project at The London College of Fashion, they were inspired by the artist Jackson Pollock. It became the basis for their startup Squid London, of which they are co-founders and directors; their main product is a Magic umbrella. In only a year they managed to sell thousands of them worldwide. Tate Britain keeps coming back to Squid London for orders.
What’s next? – To grow into a globally recognized innovative brand.
The NextWomen talks with the female entrepreneurs about their entrepreneurial journey so far, the funding process, how to get a foot in the door, and the mentors along the way.
“SquidLondon is a creative think-tank. The cauldron of ideas is simmering! The goal is bringing industries together: fashion, science and marketing.”
1. Magic Umbrellas… How did you come up with the idea of your start-up?
Imagine it starts to rains and your ordinary black umbrella changes colour into a walking piece of art….
We thought: “How cool would it be, if you walked down the street, its starts to rain and your clothes changed colour”. So they got to work: researching, developing, liaising, sourcing and designing!
2. From Design Student to Female Entrepreneur and Co-founders? Tell us how you work?
We met at The London College of Fashion whilst studying their BA (Hons) in Product Design and Development. Our first project as a team we designed the costumes for the London Olympics Handover Ceremony in Beijing. With this experience of studying together we consider ourselves an excellent team to manage all areas of our startup.
And we believe that two heads are better than one.
With the two of us we are managing: Design, Research and Development, IP, Website, Marketing/PR, Blog/SEO, Production. Accountancy, Quotes, Sales. Its a lot, but that’s what a startup is all about.
3. How did you fund it, with how much money, and what is the business model? Read more
Bespoke Shoe Design Site, Upper Street, to Launch March 2010
Having the option and ability to design your own little piece of fashion is becoming ever more popular. Nike began the craze with their Nike ID range, enabling sport lovers to personalise their trainers. More recently, companies are taking the concept online, and it seems the competition is building.
Due to launch March 1st 2010, Upper Street is:
‘The made-to-order footwear label that lets you create your ultimate pair of designer shoes. Choose the style, all the detailing and the finish, then sit back while our craftsmen create your one-of-a-kind pair, delivered right to your door. Upperstreet.com – the perfect way to unleash your creative streak or simply create the shoes you’ve always searched for.’
Co-founded by sisters Julia and Katy Grinham, the site has the potential to be very slick and already has a sneak preview of the immense options to come on its facebook page. With sizes ranging from a UK 2 – 10 (I know a lot of women that will be excited by such broad offerings), there is reported to be hundreds of materials, colours and embellishments – including Swarovski gems – that can only signal shoe heaven for those of us who just cannot resist. With seven basic style choices – including courts, sandals, gladiator heels and round toe platforms – users can design a shoe for any occasion, even for their wedding day.
Bridal Shoes (all pictures from upperstreet Facebook page)
The site already gives a written teaser for what is to come. ‘The Rise of The Killer Heel’ talks about ‘delicate pieces’ and ‘foot confection’ which only strengthens the notion that women and shoes are like children in a sweet shop. It goes beyond providing a platform for simply designing shoes, however, presenting fashion trends and celebrity inspiration: Read more
Free Websites for Female Entrepreneurs in West London
A bit of local news…. For many, the cost of building a website from scratch can seem astronomical and with the economy as it is one that is sometimes neglected. For start-ups in W2, W8, W10 and W11, however, Christmas appears to have come early, as Notting Hill Internet Services have announced they are providing free basic websites in an attempt to give something back to their community.
Having launched their business over 10 years ago and now with a thriving business, the company recognises the bootstrapped nature of many businesses can often prevent them from having an online presence. By providing companies access to such a service, they hope they can move ventures from a fledgling start-up to a flourishing business.
The Finer Details
The package normally costs £299 + VAT along with hosting for a year of £99 +VAT and includes:
- Up to 5 HTML pages from our ready-made templates Read more
Start-up Interview: Female Entrepreneur Ester Saez of CosmetoFruits
Ester Saez
Let’s face it, most of us would love an elixir of eternal youth, and most of us look for it in the form of skin products. Here, Ester Saez, co-founder of COSMETOFRUITS talks to The NextWomen about the challenges of starting a business, the benefits that working and studying abroad can bring and how their antioxidant elixir will help to combat free-radical damage.
Tell us a bit about yourself – your background and education?
I am a happily married woman and mother of two, who decided a year ago to join the entrepreneurial world. After a long and fun career in marketing, I decided to follow my heart and put my experiences in bringing brands and products from their development stage to the regional marketplace, into practice.
Throughout my 16+ marketing years I have performed roles for highly visible and well reputed brands in multinational consumer companies (locally and internationally), including a number of retailers in various International markets – Chile, South America, and Europe, and have also led virtual teams. I reached high executive positions and enjoyed a sense of pride being part of their growth, achieving professional and personal challenges and goals.
At the Beginning of 2009 I joined the world of entrepreneurship in Chile by starting up my own business, entering the increasingly emerging nutri-cosmetic industry. I also dedicate several hours per week to mentoring innovation projects, which brings me ideas and happiness.
Being an entrepreneur is definitely tough, but it is an incredible challenge, and one I thrive on as I work to balance it with my family.
What is COSMETOFRUIT? When did you launch and what are your local and global objectives over the next three years?
The new and first Chilean COSMETOFRUIT is a concentrated antioxidant elixir with clear benefits for cosmetic welfare to fight free radical damage, repair skin and retard future signs of aging from inside out. Our goal is to become a valued and well-reputed global specialist in the creation and development of cosmetofood systems / products, and be a leader in the emerging world of the nutri-cosmetic industry “beauty from within”. Furthermore, promoting and participating in the development of Chileans’ flagship active ingredients, and their commercialisation at a global scale.
The Project consists of developing and internationally marketing molecular nutri-cosmetic products and food supplements with cosmetic benefits based on extracts of polyphenols from Chilean berries and grapes, which provide 40% more antioxidants than similar ones cultivated in other lands.
We are currently in the phase of formulations, stability and clinical studies, and aiming at having products ready for marketing in the coming 4 to 5 months, at which point our site will go live.
Our products count on the scientific support from academic institutions: PUC-DICTUC and the bio-technology development from Lucien Biotechnologies Chile, an emerging Chilean biotechnology laboratory, which guarantees the right ORAC levels present in these products, unique in their wild form in our Chilean fruits. Furthermore, our project is applying for R&D&I funding from the Chilean government.
How are your products different from those of your competitors?
In one word, their origin: CHILE and hence the source of our raw materials.
Chile is an exceptional bioclimatic island. The composition of rich soils and unique climate conditions close to the Los Andes Mountains and Humboldt Current, are favoured by high levels of light (seen nowhere else) and provide greater temperature differences during the day (greater generation of polyphenols and flavonoids), which in turn allows for optimum crop height growth.
The state of the art biotechnology processing applied to our products, and no others, also allows us the benefit of identifying the product’s precise ORAC score (level of antioxidants).
Will you sell predominantly on the internet or do you intend to have a high street presence? Read more
Start-up Interview: Fits.me are Ruling the World with Robots
Joint winner of the Pitch-preneur session during our Darwinian Business event last week, Heikki Haldre of Fits.me talks to The NextWomen about ‘Ruling the World with Robots’ , iron lady of their team – Maarja Kruusmaa and the value of having a great team behind your venture.
Heikki Haldre and Maarja Kruusmaa
1. What is Fits.me and how will it change my life?
Fits.me is a Virtual Fitting Room for online clothing retailers. It lets online shoppers see how different sizes of clothing will look on their body.
We hope that it will help to increase sales to people who would not otherwise buy clothes without trying them first, and in turn will decrease returns, the majority of which are due to poor fit.
If the premises are correct, this dramatic step will solve the single main problem the online clothing retail business has today – no fitting room.
2. Can you tell me a bit about yourself?
When creating a virtual fitting room for online clothing retailers, I was jokingly telling people that once I had a dream “to rule the world with robots”. While the whole concept is based on bio-robotics research in Estonia, we will, perchance, rule a bit of the fashion world.
I am a serial entrepreneur with experience in corporate financial consulting and internet logistics business, and partner in a little chain boutique promoting young fashion designers in Estonia and Latvia.
The technical development is led by Maarja Kruusmaa, PhD, who heads the Centre of Bio-robotics at Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia. Maarja is an iron lady with a black belt in karate, and yet probably one of the few top level scientists in Estonia to have had her own TV show.
3. How did you come up with the idea?
I’m a strong proponent of a great team – this is how great ideas grow into amazing ideas, and it’s very true for Fits.me. We believe that the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
4. Who is in the Fits.me team? Read more
Doodle Premium Services Launch Personalised Event Scheduling
 Doodle Customised Snapshot |
As more companies realise there is no such thing as a free lunch, Doodle, the popular Web 2.0 online scheduling tool, has today launched Premium Doodle, a personalised version of the tool which allows fans to create their own custom look and feel and take advantage of richer features.
The First 30 NextWomen readers who click through to the service – after 12 noon today – can use it for free with the unique NextWomen code: pin7daki. To see a customised example check out the Next Web page
Doodle provides solutions that take the pain out of finding the right date and time for a group of people to meet and makes scheduling virtually effortless. The basic service – which is free and does not require registration – is the world’s leading online scheduling tool with a rapidly growing user base of more than three million unique visitors per month. With a few clicks, Doodle allows users to establish a “poll” – a tabular display of possible available time slots – invite participants and enable them to vote transparently and democratically for their preferred meeting times and activities. Premium Doodle is Doodle’s customised service for individuals and Branded Doodle is the online scheduling enterprise solution.
Available for a fee of just £18 annually, Premium Doodle expands the company’s paid-for offerings for its repeat users; the free version of the tool is still available for any Web user.
“Many users like to personalise their web experience,” said Michael Näf, founder and CEO of Doodle. “Fans of Doodle want to get their own, ads-free look and feel when scheduling. We’re providing an innovative Web tool that’s fun to use, makes scheduling a breeze, and now enables people to express their individuality—all at a very low cost.”
Premium Doodle takes less than a minute to set up online. Its template includes headers, footers, backgrounds and avatars that can be customised; any part of the design can be changed as often as the user desires. Premium Doodle customers can also request personal information from their event participants, such as postal address, e-mail address and phone number. Read more
Offline My-Skincare Founder on Launching her Own Organic SkinCare Products Online
Myreen Young is both a brick-and mortar entrepreneur with her Yakushi Beauty Salon, as an online entrepreneur with her website MY-SkinCare.co.uk, specialising in all natural and organic products. It’s the combination which makes her business innovative, flexible and an accelerator of growth.
After the opening of her beautysalon Yakushi, she immediately started to making her own healthcare and skincare products with simple ingredients, but only 3 years ago she decided to develop this part of her business further both offline and online, since the challenge of making it a scalable business were promising. On the start of the business she says:
“I started Yakushi about 25 years ago with a bank loan (loans were easier to get in those days), I rented a small shop in the high street and persuaded the landlord not to take three months rent up front but to trust me. I employed one girl to work alongside me and we alternated between doing treatments and minding the shop. The first year was tough and selling other peoples products when I was not sure what was in them didn’t appeal to me. As well as being a qualified therapist I had also done A levels in Human biology, Botany and Chemistry and was keen to make my own products.”
The products are sold through the website all over the world. Her brand is supported by her salon, her qualification as a lecturer and her own teaching school, The School of Holistic Therapies. On the development of the products she says the following:
“I persuaded a local cosmetic scientist to show me a few tricks of the trade and from then on nothing could stop me I was like a woman possessed. I gleaned a lot of information from my clients and talking to them in the privacy of a beauty room they told me what they wanted from products they bought. My first range was a healthcare care, not sexy but necessary and sold very well. These products were what people wanted every day, muscular aches, joint problems, skin problems, thrush, piles. For these products I used simple ingredients (and today I always keep the ingredients listing small) organic essential oils, organic carrier oils and coco butter. However, in the last 4 years I became more interested in using organic ingredients and moving on to extracts, vitamins and sunscreens.”
After the products were a success, Myreen developed the idea of launching a separate company focusing on a professional organic product line. On the starting and funding of this new company she says the following:
I started MY Skincare Ltd as another company and 3 years ago with my current Director George Bailey-Haigh – Director (Cosmetic chemist, Skin scientist and Environmental scientist), who made the first samples. George could see the potential of my ideas and did all the research and development and he put in his time for free. At the time, I could not oversee all the costs that would be involved in developing such a professional product line, but I had got this far so I wasn’t stopping now. I maxed up as many credit cards as I could get and then remortgaged my house.
She strives for perfection, with the high costs associated with it:
“I want much, I want the ingredients to be right, it must be active, natural, organic, the right consistency and there must be no chemicals. On top of that I want it to look perfect; I have changed the bottles twice and the labels twice. It meant that with the advertising and trying to market the product I have stretched myself very thin. At the start I used one of the rooms at Yakushi to use as a office and I think I have never worked so hard in my life; stressful is an understatement.”
It took about nine months research to get the ingredients listings right and then another six months to get the consistency right but now I have got products that people like and buy.
Through online sales, affilate schemes, products are sold internationally.
“MY Skincare now supplies over 60 salon across the UK and is sold through our own website and through affilates such as Amazon, who stock all of our products. We sell internationally. The first year of trading all the profit went on advertising and literature, the second year was very encouraging, and now we are hoping to have a very healthy turnover and profit. I talk with my team several times a day and have weekly meetings with my business partner, so that we are both in the picture about the growth of the company. Yakushi has always been my bread and butter and continues to be successful, but we have estimated that our figures for the new online products business is on the way to a 500,000 pounds turnover. Read more
Jules Pieri puts Products and their Stories at the heart of her Startup
Jules Pieri from jules.dailygrommet.com
Jules Pieri is founder and CEO of Daily Grommet, which connects shoppers with one unique product – a Grommet- a day by sharing the story behind its creation in a short video. Creatively, the definition of a Grommet reads as follows:
* It’s a wonderful product still waiting in the wings, just ripe for discovery.
* It has great utility, or style, or invention. Or, very often it has all three.
* It comes from a designer, or inventor, or artist, or manufacturer who is clearly passionate about what they create. Someone who loves to share their creations and talk to people about why they do what they do.
* It comes from a company that treats its customers well.
* Finally, like any intelligent or beautiful product, it has a great story, ready to be told.
Eventhough the company puts the product and the story at the core of their business, and thus says that those products, and their creators, and the people who love them (the products, that is) are the real heroes at Daily Grommet, it is Jules who came up with the refreshing concept, based on her long term expertise in strategic products development.
Jules has been building consumer brands and developing innovative products for over twenty years. She held positions in Strategic Planning at Stride Rite Corporation and in Strategic Marketing and Licensing at Keds Corporation. She also worked with Playskool as product strategy consultant, and at Design Continuum, a leading international product design and engineering consultancy. She lived in Ireland from 2001-2005, where she consulted to consumer facing enterprises. Jules’ expertise and enthusiasms span social media, retail, brand, and product strategy.
As a consumer products expert, she considers her core competency to be cultural anthropology; in other words, figuring out why people do the things they do, and making businesses and products that respond to real consumer behaviours and needs. Jules often writes about these topics on her blog, and also contributes to Intent.com, a wellness destination for capturing and sharing peoples’ intentions – personal, social, spiritual and environmental.
Jules studied Industrial Design, Graphic Design, and French at the University of Michigan, and was conferred an MBA degree by Harvard University, where she was selected by faculty members to receive the Ellis-LeBaron Fellowship. Following her blog gives you insight in the design, social media, cultural anthropology and her own start-up.
Web Tools Doodle heals Glastonbury Admin Headaches
 Willow Woman - Glastonbury 2008 The UK’s summer of music 2009 kicks off to a brilliant start with Glastonbury this week, headlined by Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young and Blur. It may even be sunny, for the first time in a few years. Gigs and other music events help to bring friends together. People meet from all ends of the country and travel great distances to see their favourite bands. While the experience is always positive in the end, sometimes the pain of getting large groups together can dampen spirits. However, Doodle – the easy online scheduling tool – can take the angst out of gig meetups for an epic summer of music. |
Michael Naef, CEO at Doodle, explains further:
“For music fans, discovering when people are free to attend a gig together, or when to meet up during Glastonbury, can cramp even the most free spirits. It typically involves emailing each other or sending around events details on Facebook, then calling people to confirm. It can be notoriously easy to miss your friends at Glastonbury.”
Doodle Screenshot
“On the other hand Doodle plans meetups in seconds, by simply going to doodle.com and putting in your date/time options for your gig meetups, and sending the unique URL to your event around to friends. They simply tick the time they’re free and you have a date. Our site is extremely lean, so it loads just as easily on your phone as your PC. Music fans need spontaneous, mobile tools at gigs,” Naef said.
Doodle has 3 million unique users around the world, with people scheduling meetups for work events, business meetings, and a myriad of personal meetings ranging from going to the movies, stag and hen do’s, to music and theatre events. Doodle is a completely free tool that can be accessed wherever the internet and mobile reception is – even from the muddy fields of Glastonbury.
“We hope all UK Doodle users can embrace the summer of music and put admin headaches to rest with our free tool,” concluded Naef. “Glastonbury’s famous healing grounds are about making life simpler and sweeter, and many new web tools have the same objective. Music and tech can indeed make a great marriage.”
For more information about Doodle, the web’s easiest scheduling tool, visit doodle.com.
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