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how did you start your business how did you start this business from scratch how did you start how did you start and how did you get customers to know you and how long did it take you to get famous how did you start I have no idea where to begin hi guys my name is Tina Nan I'm the founder of XXL scrunchie I launched my small business in January 2020 in my tiny 400t apartment like my bed was right here and the stove was right beside it the bathroom was just like a skip away it was so small and today today we operate out of our 5,000 ft Warehouse we're almost 4 and 1/2 years old which is crazy since starting our journey and my small business I just thought I would be you know selling scrunchies but I've been asked so many questions since I've started like the ones you saw at the beginning of the video and I still get them to this day and it's so hard for me to answer something like that in a comment back to someone so I thought I would make this video and finally answer that question how did I start my small business how I began selling and shipping online what I did in the beginning my mistakes and what I would do differently now because guys I made a lot of mistakes I hope what I share today will give you the tools or maybe even the inspiration to start today because you literally can because if I did it you can too this is also kind of like the story of how starting a small business transformed my life it now now gave me something I love doing it allowed me to also get closer to my parents because at the beginning I asked for their help and then I moved home with them and took over their house we got a lot closer especially during the pandemic all we were doing was we're all making scrunchies together in their house this video is going to explain exactly how I got started including the credentials you need an email you need platforms you might want to post your website on the costs how to even get a website and what that really entails and even the domain name how to ship an order and sell online I'm also going to share what I would do differently in each of those moments because I would have done it a lot differently with hindsight as a benefit starting a small business I know can be really daunting because at first I did say no my cousin when I made her the first scrunchie as a gift she told me to start as a business and I I said no I was like that's crazy like where do I even begin that just the words starting a business sounds like so much work but I'm really going to break it down for you guys so I hope that it can really Inspire at least one person to know that they can start too because the benefits truly are lifechanging you have the opportunity to Be Your Own Boss to make your own hours and mainly the thing I love about it is creating something that's truly my own the other night I'm looking up these new samples and designing these other products and picking new fabrics for our next next collection drop and I was like I love that eye I get to pick all of this for my store and I get to build things for like our brand and art we have a team that is believes in it too and the community our community I'm really grateful for basically the sky is the limit because I started with one XXL scrunchie now we have mini scrunchies xxs scrunchies we just launched hair bows we have hair claw Clips in three sizes we're going to launch more sizes I launched a beach towel with my artwork we have tote bags with my artwork I designed all the packaging the sky is the limit when you have a small business or when you're an [Music] entrepreneur Tada and if they ordered two I would scan it twice if they ordered this one I would scan hope you guys don't mind I'm just going to be elastic King scrunchies to make the most of my time as some of you may know I that I usually do that this video is going to explain exactly how I started my small business what things cost me when I started the way I went about things How I Learned what I learned and I think the most valuable thing about this is what I would have done differently feel free to learn from my mistakes that I like to call life lesson but I I hope you do know that starting a small business is daunting it is scary and you are like exposing yourself but the benefits are lifechanging because you really do get to have something of your own that you built that you control that you get to grow into whatever size that you want to grow it into if you want a 20,000 ft Warehouse you could get it one day you could build it up to that let's get into it now what did I get ready before I launched my small business so from the moment if some of you don't know it was December 2019 where I made a scrunchie out of one of my mom's old shirts gifted it to my cousin and she told me to start as a business I'm going to be sharing from what happened the moment I decided to start the small business until I launched it and there was about like a 2 we period in between the launching of it and the day I we decided it was going to happen have you heard of CRM software customer relationship management software refers to business applications that help companies organize all their customer information in one place to streamline communication one such application is Begin by Zoho CRM Zoho Corporation is one of the world's most prolific technology companies with over 55 apps in nearly every major business category and bigan is one of the most recent recently launched CRM applications from Zoho and is trusted by over 20,000 businesses worldwide if you're running a small business like us and facing challenges managing your day-to-day business activities or know any entrepreneurs finding it difficult to manage their customer information watch and share this video with them as ban can play a major role in simplifying business processes with ban you can store all customer details all in one place manage emails calls meetings and WhatsApp messages directly from bin integrate with Gmail 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its operations with software like bigin likewise be it any business ban will have it covered best part Ban's highly rated mobile applications help take your business information with you anywhere anytime and you don't need to worry about the cost as ban offers a free forever plan and their paid Edition starts at just $7 per user per month making it the most affordable CRM solution in the market you can also get up to 50% off up to $100 by using this code begin scrunchy so what did I get ready before one the business name I'm going to list all the points and then we'll go through the points in detail together business name so we came up with XXL and then I decided to call it XXL scrunchie and then I didn't I knew one day I wanted to grow it to more than scrunchies so I decided the website name XXL and co.com cuz I didn't want it to be XXL scrunchie tocom because that would be confusing for future customers when we don't just sell scrunchies a business email so you'll need your one business name two Business website three business email you need an address you need to have an address for if packages get returned to you you need to have that address somewhere and just for legal purposes you need to have an address so at that time I had entered my parents address as the business address everything was my parents address another question you might have is do I need to give my home address if I'm starting my small business from home the answer is like yes and no I did want to do a PO Box because I did feel the same concerns as you like oh my God don't want to give out my home address PO Boxes I think don't accept like big packages like big bigger ones and you'll probably be ordering supp wi and it's just more of a hassle to go there than to just get packages delivered to your home and have your home address as the address it's way more convenient nothing ever really happened to us if that makes you feel any better you need a logo so this is where it was easier for me before I started XXL scrunchie it was a graphic designer and that was what I thought I was going to pursue doing graphic design and painting murals so I had the graphic design skills to brand everything I needed and even make my website so you're going to need a logo but if you aren't familiar with graphic design as not everyone can just pull that out of their I don't know bag of tricks you might need to hire a designer if you want a custom logo or just make a simple one on canva canva is a free app and you could just make a really really simple logo they have logo templates you could choose from and then customize your own logo but you're going to need a logo cuz that's how Brands that's how customers recognize you by your logo logo it's all part of The Branding which is incredibly important for building your business in your community for your customers and be recognizable as you grow you need photography and photos and you need so for social media this is what our profile photo is and that's what it's been since the beginning so that's why you need a logo for your profile photo and you need photos because I'll get to that so photos you do not need to get a fancy photographer at first starting out I did not have a photographer and I don't regret that I did have a Nikon camera but the iPhone takes just as good photos now so you'll need to have photos so that before you launch have a couple photos posted already on your Instagram page that when you launch your Instagram page isn't just blank and it has some product pictures on there already so people can find and look at it so that's why you need photos I just went in My Condo building there was like a there's like one of those amenities rooms that everyone can rent and use so I just went there with all my scrunchies and took photos on the tables and I remember I had a pillow like this and it was white and fuzzy I'll have to find the photos I would just put scrunchies on there and take the picture I would put the camera on timer put my arm in front and take the picture or if I was taking a picture in my own hair I would set the timer on camera and then run pose go back change the scrunchie and go again and that's what I did for like the first year if you're just starting just use your phone or whatever you have and make sure you have good lighting for your photos you also need to write your about me bio for on your website and a little blur about yourself you'll need to insert those blurbs about yourself basically everywhere on all your social media pages that you make on your website just you're going to need that so be prepared to pre-write that you'll also need social media handles and you'll want them to be consistent so you'll need Instagram Facebook Pinterest YouTube uh Tik Tok and Twitter just letting you guys know I don't think Twitter allows dots in between cuz on Instagram we're XXL do scrunchy but on Twitter we're XXL scrunchie so keep that in mind when you're making your handles by the way if you already have a website up and running and you kind of just want marketing tips how to grow your small business and get sales you can watch one of these videos I already made and then when you're done if you haven't done that and you finish this video you can watch that next so I have you guys prepared and ready to go [Music] so Point number one registering your small business you like according to the law that I don't know very well you need to register when you start making income you need to claim that income somehow through your business so at the time I was already a sole proprietor by the way I'm based in Ontario Canada so these rules may not apply to where you're living but there should it should be a similar Vibe but this is again what I did at the time I was a mural artist and graphic designer so I already was a sole proprietor and what that means is a soul proprietor also known as a soul Traders ship individual entrepreneurship or proprietorship is a type of Enterprise owned and run by one person no legal distinction about who owns the business so what does that even mean me reading that I barely can understand what that means a quick rundown I'm not an accountant so please go see one if you need accounting advice I recommend you actually start talking to one once you start getting sales or even before to help you prepare and plan they'll give you tips for Success down the road which also they could also give you advice on if you should be sole proprietor or do Corporation I wish I went sooner that's one of my biggest regrets not going to see an accountant because they could have saved me more money and helped me be better prepared and understand my finances way better and earlier but basically sole proprietor is when you're just the owner and you're not not a corporation and so you're getting paid directly to your personal income is you when you're Corporation the business gets paid and then you are an employee but also the owner of the business so it's a little bit separated benefits to both but when you're starting I think most people just start out as a sole proprietor and then once you're making more money just to be long story short once you're making more money then you incorporate but it depends on what business you're in as well so please talk to an accountant about that depending on what your business is and registering for the business itself was super easy I think Bruce needs to go outside registering was super easy I went on owner.com o wn.com and registered I think I paid like $10 or something and then that was it I was registered now that you're legally registered you're probably wondering now what how do I sell [Music] online next step is step two choosing a platform or website site this is what I'm going to explain what I did versus what I wish I did earlier I had my portfolio website for my neurals on Squarespace my website was called graphic tina.com shopping experience for your customers and for you it has so many customizations for what you need such as managing your inventory you can do it on Shopify Shopify can connect to thousands of different apps to customize your store for example right now I'm working with this app to make a custom cart that allows for tiered rewards if a customer orders $50 they'll get a free keychain or to the next tier they would get free shipping at $99 and then the next TI they would get a free gift again at 150 you can't do that on Squarespace unless you I don't even know if you can no I don't think you can't and there's detailed shipping settings you can change just Shopify the best one of the best platforms for small business e-commerce selling things online but you're probably wondering how do I set up my Shopify so you're going to need a website name with Shopify you can just sign up and then with Shopify you can buy a package to also pick your website name I are already bought my name on godaddy.com buying a domain name is literally buying like XXL and co.com or XXL scrunchie tocom that is a domain name so I already pre purchased that and then I connected it with my Shopify platform that I also bought separately so there's your website platform and you need your website name I wish I started off with Shopify would have saved me so much time because I did everything on I did everything on Squarespace and then I had to do double the work to reupload back to Shopify by the way my friend Lauren from clo Design Studio designed my website and created the template for me for me to drop in what I needed and I've edited it since but if you need a website designer highly recommend her we used to work together and we still work together to this day by the way there are monthly fees for Shopify and GoDaddy in regards to setting up your email cuz you're going to need a business email to log into all of these and create one for customers replying back to you I would just start off with a Gmail like that's what I did and then once you grow you can make your own personal custom email because that also cost money and I'm aware that you know not everyone when you're starting you want to save as much money as possible and I don't think what email is that important to have like the custom one I think it is now for Branding purposes but before I I held off a bit too details you might want to go through when you're getting your website set up filling in all the company details you'll have to fill in right terms and conditions for your site honestly what I did was look at other sites and then rewrite one version of my own you'll have to write a return policy if you have one cover all your bases you'll need to upload products photos and descriptions for whatever your selling let people know where exactly you ship to and in in uh Shopify you can set which countries exactly you ship to cuz right now we don't ship worldwide well we do but the worldwide Ones cost a lot but we're working on getting a better rate for worldwide shipping you'll need to set up your cart checkout upload your logo into the website you'll need to add an about page and a contact page for people who go to your website and might want to ask you a question you can even look at my website as a skeleton if you want to see what pages you should include for your site now you've got your website name your platforms set up you're registered just a bit more detail about Shopify it it's where your website's hosted so this is what my website looks like when I want to edit it for a new launch day it's pretty easy once you look into it and actually open it before Shopify seemed like this crazy app that was only for coders but it's pretty user friendly highly recommend you just open it take a look and it'll just make you feel way better you can also customize your cart and your check page which is going to be really important for customers actually checking out and making a purchase from you okay let's pretend you have your website set up how do you ship orders this is where I was so confused and you might laugh at what I used to do I initially had no idea how to ship anything I would ship letters to people like the most I used to do was mail letters like I never shipped anyone anything back in the day it was just so expensive to me to go ship to people things but when I first got my orders with XXL scrunchie I remember just setting up and saying shipping cost people $5 so I just was charging people $5 and I would pack up all their packages and then when I made my first little trip to the post office Canada Post I had like an arm full of packages and I handw wrote each person's address and like taped it onto each package meanwhile they like reprint their own slip so like handwriting it was a big waste of time so I had my handful of packages that I hand wrote the addresses on and you know how long some people's names are took me forever and then I would write it obviously super nice cuz like these were my first orders and I was so grateful that people like were ordering scrunchies from me from my little apartment I showed up shipping an order to someone in Toronto who lived in an apartment so I obviously couldn't deliver it myself but it was also like way across town so like an hour cost $15 plus tax and then all the orders I remember one was like too big of a dimension so it was like $30 shipping is crazy expensive guys that was my huge mistake I wish if I measured the package you can enter the package dimensions and the weight on Shopify and they give you a slightly discounted shipping rate so that's what I discovered after that you can just print the labels from home because I was taking the bus to go from my apartment to the post office and I would have to bundle up because it was Winter I had to put all my boots and my coat wait for the bus get on the bus get off the bus go inside be all sweaty from wearing so many layers and then go wait for the bus again and wait in line at the post office there was always a line so I could have saved a lot of time preprinting my slips from home now what we do is we actually have a commercial account with Canada Post the only reason I got it was cuz I got a call from a rep and they offered it to us so I don't know how you can get it but I'm sure you could call someone to ask if you're because we do still ship with Canada Post it's not like $30 a package some of them are when they weigh a lot which just means to customer order a lot but yeah shipping you're going to come across like how unbelievably expensive it is within for Canada to ship elsewhere I think in the states it's it's more reasonable I don't know that's what I've heard by the way a big mistake M I made was before in Shopify you can pre-enter the weights of items so I would weigh each scrunchie and put in the weight but then as our business grew we started having different packaging options and I didn't for some packages I didn't incorporate what the package weight would be so I would just pre-print all our shipping labels because everything was pre-weighed by product and then one day we had like hundreds of orders taken back to us cuz all the weights were off by like 10 to 20 G or something and that makes a price difference so we had to like retick and reenter in all those packages and reprint all the labels but again shipping with a platform online or having a commercial account or a small business account or shipping and printing labels online with Shopify I believe some people use click ship I've heard of and stallan Express in use them instead of going directly to like UPS or D HL or FedEx cuzz those people those shipping companies directly are really expensive if you go right to them just a tip I've recently learned another cool thing about Shopify is you can set up shipping zones so for customers I have in Canada and USA they get free shipping for over 99 Canadian and in Europe they get free shipping for over150 so you can set up little customizations like that and you can place test orders so another I guess green flx for using Shopify as your platform the next step we I wish I did sooner that we do now that I didn't do it in the beginning was to use ship station which is where you guys probably see us printing out our packing slips ship station allows you to print out packing slips on Shopify if you print out a packing list it's only organized in alphabetical order but on ship station you can organize them by these SKS that we enter per product so our products in our warehouse if you walk around they're organized by alphabetical skews so the first products are our hair pouches cotton pouches then it's XXL scrunchies so that when we're picking our orders we can go in a workflow instead of going oh the product's here and then oh we have to go all the way on the other side for the next product but if a customer orders it it will be in an alphabetical list in the order of of the path we walk when we pick orders ship station allows you to do that I explain it more further in depth in another video but I'd recommend once you get more than maybe 10 products you can look into using ship station to help you organize when you're packing your orders cuz you want to be the most time efficient possible to save time where you can because I've never realized how precious time is until I started my small business it also allows us to make barcodes and scan items to verify them like this this one's so pretty say two more colors and T because when I used to pick orders I even if people would order two of things I would Circle the number two I would still like human error would occur so now we can rely on this verification shipping system and I tried to look it up before because I always was making errors and I was like I wish there was a way to like scan items and like they tell you if it's right or wrong cuz if you scan the wrong item it also tells you it will save you a lot in having an unhappy customer or having to reship them the correct product it's just it's nice to have maybe I do wish I had it sooner not after a while I wish I had that way way sooner now I think we've gone through all the steps one registering your business two what website platform to use three what you'll need need to fill in your website and on Shopify there's tons of free themes so you can pick a free theme and then input all your stuff in you don't really don't technically need a designer to do it right away but to get one to set it up in what makes sense for your business because setting up your site in a userfriendly way is incredibly important for your sales because if a customer is trying to find something on your site and it's not easy you could lose them in just just 2 seconds if it's going to be hard to buy something and hard to navigate and even having a designer graphic designers who specializes in website design they'll know something like your images you upload should not be 300 DPI it should be a certain size that's clear enough to see on the computer but the lowest like size in megabytes or gigabytes that it needs to be because it could be taking up wasted space on your website and then slowing your website down for no reason when it doesn't need to be that big of an image and by big I mean like the data size not even like the size so I would never know that if I wasn't a graphic designer I'd be like oh it's just a photo I can put it in no there's so much more to the photo so much more okay next you also have your website domain name now you now know how to ship orders which is through your website platform you just print the label after customer prints an makes an order which is amazing or you use your shipping provider that you signed up with for example like click ship or uh I heard Chit Chats is really good for Ontario set up for shipping have your packaging I just used random poly mailers when I first started I just use whatever I could get as soon as possible registering for a shipping account so that you'll have a way to ship things and pay for your shipping fees and then the last step was ship station if you want to set that up for your to get packing slips and to barcode your items so that you can scan to verify and then scan to print you can print shipping labels right from ship station as well if you set it up set up your shipping account in ship station and that's it that's not it but those are the Bare Bones you need to start your business I didn't even have ship station or a shipping account when I started so technically you don't need those things but I wish I had those things to save me money and time instead I just kind of had to learn from my mistakes my expensive mistakes that I wish I had those sooner let me know if you have more questions about any of these topics I'm so happy to help I was really surprised when I started my small business and have received messages like these that say you inspired me I started my small business because of you I never thought like starting a small business that that would happen and that I would be able to help people in that that way because that's something I've always wanted to do help people and get back thanks for being here XXL faman members if you're seen the scrunchie and it hasn't launched yet it's part of our summer launch summer 2024 and it's going to be limited edition comes in all the sizes where's xxs hit the Subscribe button if you like what you heard like the video at the bottom if you can to help it get seen more and maybe help at least one more person if you have a a dream or an idea that you've been wanting to start for a while take this as your sign to go for it if you stumbled upon this video watched it all take it as a sign to start today because you can your chances of success are much higher if you start [Music] and