£10k In 90 Days | Day 3 | Shag Bands & Body Piercing
by NicolaCairncross on October 23, 2009
in Money Gym | Business
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:31 — 7.0MB)
The Money Gym has just launched The Boardroom, an easy, quick, flexible way for your business to access a crack business team comprising 18 of your very own non-executive directors, plus Judith Morgan and Nicola Cairncross. As part of the launch of The Boardroom, The Money Gym is offering a 33% discount on the 1st year membership (offer closes midnight 31st October) and Nicola & Judith are hosting a daily BlogTalkRadio show, where they help each business caller work out how to create an extra £10k in just 90 days from their existing business.
Today’s caller on The Money Gym “£10k In 90 Days” Challenge on our BlogTalkRadio show was Money Gym Gold client Karen Gilbert, affectionately known as “Timebomb” to all of us.
Bit of Background: This is because Karen (and her partner Rich) own http://www.TimebombTShirts.com in Croydon, an established retail fashion shop and online store. Timebomb has been trading for 6 years selling emo, punk rock, gothic and metal clothing, footwear and accessories. Classic brands such as Alchemy, Darkside Clothing and Living Dead Souls sit alongside the new breed of emo-punk clothes like Iron Fist (Check out their killer heels!), Poizen Industries , Hell Bunny and Rock Addict.
Punk Rock fashion has been in the headlines since 1977 and still the goth accessory trends create a stir in national news. The intriguingly named Shag Bands have been featured this week (mid-October 2009) in The Sun and The Daily Mail and have doubled Timebomb’s unique visitor traffic in September as their tightly targeted product review site ShagBands.co.uk ranks No 1 in Google for the term and links to their main site for Shag Bands and custom printed T-sHirts.
Bloomin’ nice nifty footwork on the internet marketing front guys!
From the average 8000 unique visitors a month over the last six months, Timebomb experienced a rise to 16,636 uniques in September. They were averaging 9 sales per month on average, with an average spend of £19, total value pcm of £171.
This increased to XXX sales (Karen? Can you remind me, it’s about four times as much isn’t it?) but at an average spend of about half the previous (Shag Bands are not very expensive but people buy LOTS of them and other retailers have been buying them from Timebomb too.
In order to increase revenue from the website which is working well, Karen has to focus on five things; more traffic, better conversion of traffic to buyers, sell them more items, increase the value of the sale and follow up afterwards and sell more related items.
Karen has a mailing list of over 1000 buyers but they are held on her ecommerce software that does not allow her to mail them. She has started collecting opt-ins to a proper mailing list management service, and the conversions on that have tripled since they changed the opt-in box to offer a discount voucher.
We talked for a moment about how best to routinely export the buyers from the ecommerce software and import them to the mailing list software, knowing that the best way being some sort of “ethical bribe” such as a discount voucher or downloadable freebie. Karen told us that another couple of Money Gym clients, Suzanne and Eileen from KeepItSimpleSoftwareTraining.com had sorted all that out for her and would look after it on an ongoing basis.
*** YUK FACTOR WARNING!! The more squeamish of you might want to look away NOW **
Karen then told us that the long-planned body piercing studio was opening that next week and we quizzed her about average spend, capacity, split with piercing artist etc. Turns out that your average piercing costs £25, £21 after VAT, there’s a 50/50 split so Karen’s profit is around £9.87.
In order to make £10k in 90 days, the studio needs to process 15 tummy buttons or other body parts per day (they are closed on Sundays). Obviously it’s going to be busier at the weekend, so those slots should be appointment only, full price and secured with a credit card. The earlier weekdays could be walk in, cheaper and with some further incentive.
This is entirely possible apparently and we discussed the fact that the piercing artist is a partner in this business, so he should either be spending their time piercing or helping to market the service, not drinking coffee with their mates.
The newly organised database allows Karen to contact by email the UK / London and South East customers and let them know about the body studio, which should get that off to a flying start.
When searching for a USP, Karen revealed that the particular piercing artist – Lawrence – she had chosen to work with was one of only a few in the UK who was trained to pierce “Freehand” without clamps.
Nicola suggested issuing a press release to the Features Editor of the local papers plus any papers that overlapped with Croydon, like Metro and the Evening Standard, and advised Karen to make it “people story” based as journalists love stories about people. The USP of the piercing artist made that very easy.
Even better, Freehand piercing is a bit contraversial, which is BRILLIANT for provoking discussion on a blog or website.
We also discussed upsells like saline solution to clean the piercing, jewellery to adorn the parts and we decided this could be a nice little earner, and if Karen cleared the decks, the piercing studio could indeed make her an extra “£10k In 90 Days”. We didn’t even get time to talk about the custom printing t-shirt aspect of their business.
Over to Judith and Karen now for their comments, feedback and questions!
** Share your thoughts, comments or questions about this particular challenge by using the “Share Your Thoughts” link at the top of this post, just by the Title **
(For more info about how you can get us to help your business make an extra “£10k in 90 days” have a look at http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/boardroom – then secure your special offer of over a third off your first years’ investment – which is 100% ROI guaranteed – only valid till 1st November 2009. First boardroom meeting Friday 6th November, Central London)
Hi Karen,
Some thoughts (some already covered in the call):
1) Leaflets about the body piercing to every person that comes in the shop and/or buys by also putting them in the bags with their purchases. Have a call to action like visit the website/tweet/enter our competition (see 2)
2)Have a competition e.g. the 1000th person to sign up gets a free piercing/body jewellery
3)Have an upsell (or several) – piercings normally come with basic stainless jewellery (is that still the case Karen?) and therefore everyone wants to buy some new jewellery for their piercing. So why not have an upsell to a certain range for buy one,get one half price? Or have the piercing (at an increased price) a piece of jewellery at a reduced price. You get the idea.
4) Let customers buy body piercing vouchers for presents
I have been thinking about this call and as I went to an amazing gig last week, the link between music and fashion.
How about sponsoring local emo/punk/goth bands or promoting their music in the shop/doing a secret gig in the shop or getting them to endorse your clothing?
Cool for them, you and their fans….
Claire
Hi Karen
Just done a quick search on “body piercing croydon” and found just over 14,000 results.
When I did the search for pages with the phrase in the title of the page, I only got 2 results.
If you did a blog posting about Lawrence, and him being the one of the only freehand specialists in the UK, and included the key phrase in the title of the post, the first line of the post and the tags of the post, you could be up there on page one of Google in a very short time indeed.
Cheers
Nicola