The site is live!

After months of hard work getting our eCommerce business ready to launch, we’ve finally done it! Eliot Turner Ltd launched a few minutes ago and is ready to take orders of our exclusive handmade jewellery.

We’ve not got all our stock listed yet as this has been an extremely time consuming process. More items of stock will be added to over the next week or two. We’ve implemented a solid stock management system, which will allow us to reorder and list new stock on a weekly basis. As most of our items are either limited editions or one offs, we can offer our customers something extremely unique.

We’re already looking at diversifying into a few other areas but you’ll have to keep an eye on the site to find out more as it happens!

We’ve got a lot happening over the next few weeks so keep coming back to see how we’re doing. We’ll be sharing stats about visitors, turnover levels and experiences via the blog.

Finding manufacturers of handmade jewellery was easy! I started by scouring the internet and visiting trade fairs. I had to twist a few arms to let me into some of the buyer fairs but after a few weeks I had my initial list. We realised there were a few hurdles to cross in order to get into this market but we felt that we had the edge.

We then hit a major stumbling block when we found out they didn’t want to sell to us. This might seem crazy but we’d forgotten to take a really important factor into account during our market research.

When we had contacted a few suppliers initially who we thought manufactured appropriate lines we’d been fairly vague about what we were planning. Our conversation went along the lines of; “We’d like to stock some of your lines, what are you terms?” We received in-depth information about trade pricing, payment terms, minimum orders, etc.

We were ready to confirm our intentions to order from them and we were being turned down. This reasoning was quite simple, that although they’re small businesses they didn’t want to lose control of their brand / identity. Many of the suppliers feared we could create such high demand we could become their only customer. This would leave them exposed if we decided to change to a new supplier or discontinue their product lines.

It’s important to remember that most of these businesses are what I refer to as cottage industries. A cottage industry is an individual, in this case manufacturing jewellery, who works from home and typically on a part time basis. This type of business is very much a lifestyle choice as they don’t want to take on staff, in order to keep costs down. I now know that several of our potential suppliers had young children so wanted to be a ’stay at home’ parent, but still have an income. They felt that by supplying to us they could jeopardise their existing client base and the longevity of their own business.

This was the opposite reaction to how a large wholesaler would react. A wholesaler would want a minimum spend from day one and expect steady growth in the first year.

Obviously being the entrepreneur, I don’t normally take no as an answer. I changed tactics and instead put in place steps to protect their brand values and also in some cases set maximum order values. Even though I tried to reassure many of the suppliers we still couldn’t get a step further with them. I never thought we’d be in this kind of position and this meant many of my assumptions about stock management had to be reassessed.

Despite these unforeseen issues I had a list of suppliers with the necessary information about how they operate and their stock & manufacturing capacities. With that in mind, it was now time to design our stock management process to build a solid business system around it.

Missing the Christmas rush might seem like madness but we decided not to launch Eliot Turner until the New Year. This was a tactical decision as we identified a risk which was not worth taking. The risk was regarding our stock management or the lack of it.

As we have a limited amount of capital in Eliot Turner we have to consider our expected sales. We recently launched an ecommerce website for one of our clients an award winning beauty salon in Newcastle. The launch of this site was so successful we had a slight panic about how to manage our own stock with very little sat on the shelf and little capital to order more. This particular website has only been soft launched as the owner is still uploading all the products. It proved our marketing formula and tactics when launching an ecommerce website are effective. If we launch the Eliot Turner website using this same formula we would face a short fall in stock.

So why not just re-stock?

Our suppliers are what I refer to as cottage industries that have few resources and little stock sat on the shelf. These suppliers during the Christmas period are themselves under huge pressure to meet the order requests from other retailers. This left us in a position where we would not have the capital to reorder in sufficient quantity and our supplier would be unlikely to meet our demands.

We are now building into our business plan a stock management structure which will allow us to ramp up stock levels in time for Christmas. The previous year’s trading history will also give us an idea as to the best selling stock so we should order the correct levels of each item / set.

At carrotmedia HQ we’ve decided to create our own online shop to really show the doubters out there that ecommerce can succeed if done correctly. We now have a huge challenge of deciding what to sell and what market sector we should target.

So what would make a good product to be sold online?

1. Easy to dispatch to customers worldwide
2. Good profit margin above 30%
3. A product which can be sold to a large market place with a high economic value
4. A product with a reasonable life-span that won’t go out of fashion or is perishable
5. The ability or option to sell a high value product

We looked at a huge number of products and came across a number of challenges which were:

1. Most wholesale suppliers wanted a minimum order of £1000 and we are trying set this up on a shoe string budget.
2. Credit terms couldn’t be agreed early on until a trading history is established
3. Banks are unhappy with certain products, these include computer hardware and mobile phones due to recent VAT fraud cases
4. We are in the business of building websites so finding a product we have experience with was extremely difficult.
5. Finding a market which isn’t too saturated is extremely difficult and finding a unique product is even more challenging

We decided to sell jewellery as our product for a number of reasons. We aren’t aiming to compete with the big boys in the market place and needed an edge that sets us apart. Therefore we are going to use small local suppliers with unique hand made products. By using numerous suppliers we can ensure a good supply of stock as these businesses traditionally sell to the wholesale market. Most people who make handmade jewellery are fairly small operations which are often run part time alongside another job. Therefore they can’t meet the demand of large high street retailers but it gives us a unique opportunity to sell a high quality product that most retailers aren’t interested in.

The product is light weight with a good profit margin which will allow us to attack an international market place. The jewellery market is a multi billion pound industry which although it is saturated in parts gives us the opportunity to position ourselves in a niche.

Now we have to define our market and choose a name, let the fun begin. We’ll be sharing every aspect of the process over the next few months and if you want to comment please let us know what you think.

We’re looking to spread this experiment far and wide so any Stumble’s, Diggs, Reddits or Tweets are very appreciated. You can even blog about us if you like.