Here is the first story in a series of our My Brand Story Contest posts dedicated to inspire digital entrepreneurs to do their best with their eCommerce projects. Sophie, the founder of Urbankissed, shares her insights about starting, running and growing her online business.
We have recently onboarded our 100th conscious brand. This milestone has been shared by many newspapers such as Forbes, Financial Times, Good On You (the largest rating app for fashion brands) and many local newspapers.
Sophie
Interview with the founder
Sophie, give us an idea of what your business is, what products you are selling, and the services you are offering?
Urbankissed is an online boutique marketplace for handmade treasures & unique finds from carefully curated small brands that care about their artisans. Their online marketplace is hunting for the most extraordinary brands full of treasures to bring you a range of products that are as unique as you are and will make your heart beat faster. Discover a wide range of one-of-a-kind products and handmade treasures, from timeless handcrafted knitwear, colourful standout accessories, bags made from hemp and funny candles.
Urbankissed was founded by the Swiss Millennial Sophie in 2017 during her studies in Fashion Business (Bachelor of Arts) in Milan & London. As a former Account Manager and Marketing Coordinator in the exclusive high-net-worth segment at a bank in Switzerland, Sophie gained her expertise in serving high-net-worth individuals and understands the importance of meticulous curation and excellent customer experience. Her enthusiasm for unique, handmade fashion and homeware from small brands has consistently been a driving force. The inspiration for Urbankissed came from a stroll through the markets of the South of France, which led to the idea of making these exceptional small brands full of hidden treasures accessible to everyone through an online platform.
What are the greatest challenges you’ve faced so far and how did you overcome them?
- Creating and providing the most engaging customer journey online -> researching and focusing a lot on this topic, learned all the css and html skills on my own to customise as much as I can on my own.
- To be a sole entrepreneur (not being able to share and discuss my ideas, fulfilling every single task) -> communicating a lot to the audience on social media, started to work with a freelancer and soon hiring the first employees.
- To evaluate our brands and make sure they really are sustainable and ethical throughout their whole supply chain -> thus, we have established our own (very unique) slow & ethical index, helping us to be consistent in choosing the right brands as well as providing transparency towards the consumers.
- To offer an up to date inventory rather than selling out of stock products -> offering many different synchronisation methods to our brands such as API connection and CSV connector.
What are some unexpected benefits of owning an eCommerce business?
- The nomadic lifestyle – you can work from everywhere.
- You can fulfil all of your ideas.
- You are your own boss.
- As we are a marketplace and thus, outsourced the logistic and shipping, we can focus on many others aspects such as marketing and customer service. This also allows us to scale a lot.
- I (the founder) did not have any knowhow in e-commerce nor building a website before. I’ve never learned so many new skills at once!
When it comes to developing new functionality for your online business, you choose Simtech Development. What are the reasons for that?
Share your feedback on cooperating with Simtech Development. What excited you most and why you decided to stay with us for several projects.
- Simtech is very professional and reliable. They have a lot of knowhow in hosting so that we don’t need to spend any minute on it.
- Reasons, among others, why our eco-conscious and slow living marketplace performs so effectively are the following add-ons from Simtech that we have plugged in to our Multi-Vendor platform: Affiliate and Referral, IP geolocation by MaxMind, Pop-up notifications pro, Shipping Estimate.
- We don’t want to use add-ons from too many different providers. Simtech has a larger offering and is very reliable in fixing bugs when there is one.
How are things going at the moment with your store?
- We have recently onboarded our 100th conscious brand. This milestone has been shared by many newspapers such as Forbes, Financial Times, Good On You (the largest rating app for fashion brands) and many local newspapers.
- I’m still managing everything on my own and occasionally have a freelancer who helps.
- We are growing very rapidly. Our revenue grew by 650% in Q1 2021.
- Very exciting things are ahead for us. Our site will be soon available in multiple languages. Our team is growing (interns and freelancers).
- In Q2 2021 we closed a pre-seed financing round.
- We have a waiting list for new brands.
What inspires and motivates you to do this business?
Is there any advice you’d suggest to other business owners based on your personal experience regarding e-store development?
- Sharing this platform to support small brands and bring you exciting, unique products with such a wonderful and dedicated community fills us with hope every day. We are a very small but highly motivated team of female entrepreneurs, and we want to offer the best in unique and fairly produced items for all the different moments in our lives. We hope to continue to be an enriching inspiration and shine a light on all the unique aspects of our brands and their products. When you buy from one of our small, carefully curated businesses, a real person does a happy dance!
- To bring all of my ideas alive.
- We have an extremely engaged audience and community throughout our social media channels.
- My advice to business owners:
- Unstoppable. Willing to work EXTREMELY hard. Just start, it does not need to be perfect from the very beginning.
- Willing to learn new things. This is a trip where you are constantly acquiring new knowledge to be able to implement your creative and commercial ideas.
- I’m sure you know the song “You can get it if you really-really want, but you must try, try and try…“ by Jimmy Cliff, and this really is the best advice I can give to every entrepreneur out there. I’m facing struggles and trying to solve problems literally every day and yes, this may sound overwhelming but in the end, if everything was easy to solve, competitors would have outpaced you very quickly.
Read more about fashion eCommerce business: ECommerce Fashion Development Industry: Trends, Statistics, And Best Practices
Closing
That was the story of Sophie, a hard-working sole entrepreneur who inspires all of us to never stop and try doing our best. Being an entrepreneur is not easy, but rewarding. Like Sophie, you can choose to focus on the business itself, leaving the technical part to a reliable partner.
You still have a chance to enroll in the Contest and win a 1,000 USD credit for custom development. To take part, answer the questions and send them to the Editor-in-Chief at [email protected].
