5 Things You Wish You Knew Before Building Your Website 10 months ago Aaron Grant. A website is the foundation of your internet survival. It is a bridge which joins your products and services to the online community. That is your market to the audience. In this digital era, it is not possible for a business to succeed without an online presence. 26 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting My Photography Business // Part 2 by Lauren Lim So here I am, sitting down to write this post, over a month after publishing the first half.
Like fashion, the lingerie industry can at times be brutal. Working in the corporate lingerie world is often a competitive, stressful and exhausting experience leaving one with stories that can rival infamous scenes from The Devil Wears Prada! Though it is a smaller offshoot of the fashion industry, the intimates market has been growing and the demand for faster turn around rates and cutting-edge products are as high as ever. Big name brands are constantly stealing designs from smaller indie labels and offering them at lower prices (and usually compromised quality) to the masses. Quality and workmanship are suffering as companies rush to reach a bigger audience and gain more revenue. Time is of the essence and the race for the next perfect panty, 'it' bra or innovative fit technique has become more competitive than ever, saturating the mainstream market with an overwhelming selection of mediocre lingerie. It's enough to make a die-hard lingerie designer want to quit!
Which is exactly what I did about a year ago this winter, when I decided that my passion for lingerie still burned bright, but my dedication to big business corporations did not. It was a tough decision to make as I'd always had big dreams of sketching gorgeous undies from a corner office, shopping the world for new fabrics and leading board meetings about the importance lace and satin. While my 12 years working for big chains and department stores allowed me a taste of this fantasy world, I found, more often than not, that the payoff was not always worth the sacrifice. Through it all, my obsession with lingerie never wavered, so I decided to stay in the industry I love while trying my hand at my own business.
After months of research and preparation I founded, an online lingerie boutique specializing in fun designer and indie labels and accessories. I now handle all aspects of the business on my own and am proud to be a small business owner, knowing that my hard work will benefit both my customers and myself without harming anyone in the process.Launching my own lingerie business took a lot of prep time, some money and a commitment to lingerie, but now that I've made the transition I couldn't be happier doing what I love on a day-to-day basis. If you have ever thought about going into business for yourself, working in the lingerie industry, or are just curious about what it entails, I've put together a list of 6 vital things to know before embarking on that great journey. A well-informed owner is one of the most critical things needed to run a successful business, so keeping these tips in mind when considering a new venture may prove helpful down the line.1) Defining your target customer is key.This may sound like a no-brainer, but if you don't know who your target customer is, you'll have a tough time retaining loyal consumers. I don't mean just knowing who your customer is, but really being attuned to everything he or she does, wants and thinks.
How old are they? Where do they live?
How much money do they make? What colors do they prefer? Where do they buy their clothes? A middle-aged housewife with a disposable income may not be looking to buy a sequin G-string with matching garter, and failing to tailor your product to her needs can quickly result in loads of missed opportunities.Surveys, focus groups and research can be a great way to learn about your customer’s preferences and buying habits. Another helpful tool that worked for me was to identify an actual person (celebrity, athlete, musician) as my target customer. I got to know everything about that person, and was soon able to pick up on little cues and details of what they wore and where they shopped. Now, whenever I'm unsure if a certain style will resonate with my customers, I always refer back to that person and ask myself, 'would they wear this or not?'
To help me decide. Having a consistent vision across the board, from your product to your marketing, is invaluable these days and can save you a lot of money in the long run.2) Estimate how long it will take you to launch. Then double it.Once I knew what direction I wanted to go in with my new venture, I put together a business plan and a timeline. Between securing the financial start-up, registering the business, buying products, building a website, and getting the word out there, the task seemed daunting. 'Two months' is what I told myself once I had registered the name and formed my business entity. I worked day and night to make it happen! But two months turned into three, and three into four.
No matter how much I had prepared, there were constantly new obstacles popping up and tasks to add to the list. Legal issues took up more time than expected, the buying process seemed to drag on for months and before I knew it, my initial launch date had come and gone!I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist, so it was hard for me to accept something as satisfactory when I was striving for the very best, but I soon learned what I had to prioritize and where I could make exceptions in order to keep the process moving along. If I hadn't learned to compromise I'd still be planning everything out today!3) Don't be afraid to charge more.You know those beautiful designer lingerie sets that are so expensive you'd have to take a loan out just to afford one? There's a reason they cost so much, and it's not just about the fine quality and craftsmanship. Often times you are paying for the brand itself and the experience that comes with it.When doing my initial planning, I first aimed for a pricing structure that would place me lower than my competitors with comparable product.
I thought that would be a great way to attract customers, and I couldn't understand why a bra would need to be marked up so high. But after months of number crunching and financial management courses I found that those products were marked up not just to make a profit, but to keep the business up and running on a daily basis. If I had dropped my prices as I had originally intended to do, I'd surely be out of business within a year. It is important to set each price for adequate accommodation of your business's overhead budget, taking into account employee salaries and the cost of goods, supplies, legal fees, advertising, etc. I learned that a smart pricing structure is directly related to the cost of doing business.
If you price your goods accordingly, your customers are sure to understand and learn to view you as a respectable entity.4) Not everyone wants to help out a start-up business.One of the most surprising things I realized in my early months is that not many people were interested in selling their product to a new online boutique. I thought that, as a small independent business, I'd be respected and supported by the brands I wanted to do business with, but that seemed to only be the case with a select few. After numerous unanswered emails and rejections, one sympathetic vendor finally told me that many brands only want to work with larger, established companies. These brands often hire agents to manage their sales and are very strict about how much money they bring in.
Big retailers pay big bucks and buy big quantities, leaving us little guys to struggle with more limited options.It was a disappointing fact to learn, but thankfully, most of the labels that will work with start-ups (many of them indie brands themselves) know the value of partnership and have been supportive from the get go. These are the brands I look forward to forming lasting relationships with, and remind me why I continue to love this industry so much.5) Social media can be your best friend.When putting together a budget, don't neglect to allot funds for advertising and marketing to get your name out there and attract potential customers.
However, smart budgeting is important and it can pay to get creative with your resources.Social media is a great place to establish a presence and build a following for little or no money. Your target customer most likely uses social media every day - whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any of the numerous others.
So what better way to reach them than to appeal directly to their preferences? In fact, social media is such a daily part of our lives that not establishing a presence on one or more of these sites could potentially have a negative effect on your credibility as a reputable business!I began spreading the word through friends and family on platforms that made the most sense to my business, like Pinterest and Tumblr, which are great places to visibly show off fashion products. Establishing my presence before I had even launched the business also proved helpful, as I had a base of followers already secured once my website finally launched.
Being active on these sites and engaging other users can go a long way, and all it takes is a little bit of your time.6) Listen to your customers (but know when to say no).With the lack of personal care and service plaguing many of the big name brands, it's no wonder so many people prefer to shop online. This makes customer service especially important in this day and age.
Being able to reach a representative and be treated respectfully and in a timely manner is something all consumers can appreciate, especially when times are tough. And with multiple social media platforms available to them, an unhappy customer has more influence today than in the past.But it can often be hard to distinguish between a concerned customer and a troublemaker. It's important to listen to suggestions and feedback and truly take it in and learn from your mistakes. Just make sure to find a healthy balance. I’ve received countless tips and advice from well-meaning friends and colleagues that have proven helpful throughout my launch. However, when some suggestions began to conflict with the vision of my business, I knew I had to draw the line.
My commitment to customer service will always remain a priority, but I’ve learned that trusting my gut is what will keep me afloat in this competitive and ever-evolving market.What are your thoughts about big business vs. Independent start-ups? Do you have any other advice you would offer? Reading your articles has given me so much hope (and a healthy dose of fear as well)! I want to open my own local brick & morter “lingerie” (BDSM gear, harnesses, kink lifestyle specifically, great example: CoCo De Mer) store sooo bad, I eat/sleep/breathe the idea and I’ve got ideas streamlined, right down to seasonal store displaysproblem is I live in TN (bible belt south) thats more conservative (seriously, IF a school chooses to have a sex education class they are “encouraged” to teach abstinence only before marriage).
I know there’s a kink community here (according to the nearly 5k active LOCAL accounts on FetLife.com) & currently have 2 LGBTQ clubs in our city as well, add to the fact that literally there aren’t any places in town to get descent lingerie (only options are big box store Victoria’s Secret, Lane Bryant, Soma or two local adult xxx stores selling cheap stripper wear), I believe I could either really really succed or fail astronomicallyany advice you have I would greatly appreciate it beyond measure. Hi Kristina, I’m very green in the industry coming from a psychology background and I’m looking to develop an underwear line focused on empowering women to feel more confident. Thank you for sharing these insights, I’ve found it a great launch point. I’m early in my start up but I’m nervous about your point that bigger companies can easily steal/copy your idea. Do you have any advice about how to protect your product before putting it out there to be exposed and vulnerable (much like myself in launching a business)??:).
Wow, sounds like there’s some great potential in that market – that’s wonderful and I’m glad you found my post helpful! Getting across to brands can be tricky especially nowadays.
I would just email as many as possible and don’t get discouraged if you only hear back from a small percentage of them. The ones who do partner with you will most likely become strong relationships that will foster over time. Lingerie trade shows are also a great place to start where you can get a lot done in a little time. If you have the financial means to do it I would definitely suggest attending one or two of those once you’re ready to launch. Good luck to you!!
By Cecily Carver Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code And what I’ve learned from teaching others Before you learn to code, think about what you want to codeKnowing how to code is mostly about building things, and the path is a lot clearer when you have a sense of the end goal. If your goal is “learn to code,” without a clear idea of the kinds of programs you will write and how they will make your life better, you will probably find it a frustrating exercise.I’m a little ashamed to admit that part of my motivation for studying computer science was that I wanted to prove I was smart, and I wanted to be able to get Smart Person jobs.
I also liked thinking about math and theory ( blew my mind at an impressionable age) and the program was a good fit. It wasn’t enough to sustain me for long, though, until I found ways to connect technology to the things I really loved, like music and literature.So, what do you want to code? A startup that makes you rich? Interactive art? Do you want to be able to impress your boss or automate a tedious task so you can spend more time looking at otter pictures?
Perhaps you simply want to be more employable, add a buzzword to your resume, or fulfill the requirements of your educational program. All of these are worthy goals.
Make sure you know which one is yours, and study accordingly. There’s nothing mystical about itCoding is a skill like any other. Like language learning, there’s grammar and vocabulary to acquire. Like math, there are processes to work through specific types of problems. Like all kinds of craftsmanship and art-making, there are techniques and tools and best practices that people have developed over time, specialized to different tasks, that you’re free to use or modify or discard.(a very smart guy! Whose other writings I enjoy and frequently agree with!) posits that there is a bright line between people with the True Mind of a Programmer and everyone else, who are lacking the intellectual capacity needed to succeed in the field. That bright line consists, according to him, of pointers and recursion (there are primers and for the curious).I learned about pointers and recursion in school, and when I understood them, it was a delightful jolt to my brain — the kind of intellectual pleasure that made me want to study computer science in the first place.
But, outside of classroom exercises, the number of times I’ve had to be familiar with either concept to get things done has been relatively small. And when helping others learn, over and over again, I’ve watched people complete interesting and rewarding projects without knowing anything about either one.There’s no point in being intimidated or wondering if you’re Smart Enough. Sure, the more complex and esoteric your task, the higher the level of mastery you will need to complete it. But this is true in absolutely every other field.
Unless you’re planning to make your living entirely by your code, chances are you don’t have to be a recursion-understanding genius to make the thing you want to make. It never works the first time And probably won’t the second or third timeWhen you first start learning to code, you’ll very quickly run up against this particular experience: you think you’ve set up everything the way you’re supposed to, you’ve checked and re-checked it, and it still. You don’t have a clue where to begin trying to fix it, and the error message (if you’re lucky enough to have one at all) might as well say “fuck you.” You might be tempted to give up at this point, thinking that you’ll never figure it out, that you’re not cut out for this. I had that feeling the first time I tried to write a program in C, ran it, and got only the words “segmentation fault” for my trouble.But this experience is so common for programmers of all skill levels that it says absolutely nothing about your intelligence, tech-savviness, or suitability for the coding life.
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It will happen to you as a beginner, but it will also happen to you as an experienced programmer. The main difference will be in how you respond to it.I’ve found that a big difference between new coders and experienced coders is faith: faith that things are going wrong for a logical and discoverable reason, faith that problems are fixable, faith that there is a way to accomplish the goal. The path from “not working” to “working” might not be obvious, but with patience you can usually find it. Someone will always tell you you’re doing it wrong. You should, but actually.
But.There are almost always many different approaches to a particular problem, with no single “right way.” A lot of programmers get very good at advocating for their preferred way, but that doesn’t mean it’s the One True Path. Going head-to-head with people telling me I was Wrong, and trying to figure out if they were right, was one of the more stressful aspects of my early career.If you’re coding in a team with other people, someone will almost certainly take issue with something that you’re doing. Sometimes they’ll be absolutely correct, and it’s always worth investigating to see whether you are, in fact, Doing It Wrong. But sometimes they will be full of shit, or re-enacting an ancient and meaningless dispute where it would be best to just follow a style guide and forget about it.On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys ancient but meaningless disputes (grammar nerds, I’m looking at you), you’ve come to the right place. Someone will always tell you you’re not a real coder.“Coding” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and it looks different now from how it used to.
And, funnily enough, the tools and packages and frameworks that make it faster and easier for newcomers or even trained developers to build things are most likely to be tarred with the “not for REAL coders” brush. (See: “”)Behind all this is the fear that. But I think that this gatekeeping is destructive.Use the tools that make it easiest to build the things you want to build.
If that means your game was made in Stencyl or GameMaker rather than written from scratch, that’s fine. If your first foray into coding is HTML or Excel macros, that’s fine. Work with something you feel you can stick with.As you get more comfortable, you’ll naturally start to find those tools limiting rather than helpful and look for more powerful ones. But most of the time, few people will ever even look at your code or even ask what you used — It’s what you make with it that counts. Worrying about “geek cred” will slowly kill youSee above.
I used to worry a lot, especially in school, about whether I was identifying myself as “not a real geek” (and therefore less worthy of inclusion in tech communities) through my clothing, my presentation, my choice of reading material and even my software customization choices. It was a terrible waste of energy and I became a lot more functional after I made the decision to let it all go.You need to internalize this: your ability to get good at coding has nothing to do with how well you fit into the various geek subcultures. This goes double if you know deep down that you’ll never quite fit. The energy you spend proving yourself should be going into making things instead. And, if you’re an indisputable geek with cred leaking from your eye sockets, keep this in mind for when you’re evaluating someone else’s cred level. It may not mean what you think it does.
Sticking with it is more important than the methodThere’s no shortage of articles about the “right” or “best” way to learn how to code, and there are lots of potential approaches. You can learn the concepts or by. And, of course, there are lots of languages you might choose as your first to learn, with advocates for each.A common complaint with “teach yourself to code” programs and workshops is that you’ll breeze happily through the beginner material and then hit a steep curve where things get more difficult very quickly. You know how to print some lines of text on a page but have no idea where to start working on a “real,” useful project.
You might feel like you were just following directions without really understanding, and blame the learning materials.When you get to this stage, most of the tutorials and online resources available to you are much less useful because they assume you’re already an experienced and comfortable programmer. The difficulty is further compounded by the fact that “you don’t know what you don’t know.” Even trying to figure out what to learn next is a puzzle in itself.You’ll hit this wall no matter what “learn to code” program you follow, and the only way to get past it is to persevere. This means you keep trying new things, learning more information, and figuring out, piece by piece, how to build your project. You’re a lot more likely to find success in the end if you have a clear idea of why you’re learning to code in the first place.If you keep putting bricks on top of each other, it might take a long time but eventually you’ll have a wall.
This is where that faith I mentioned earlier comes in handy. If you believe that with time and patience you can figure the whole coding thing out, in time you almost certainly will. FreeCodeCamp is a donor-supported tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (United States FederalTax Identification Number: )Our mission: to help people learn to code for free. We accomplish this by creating thousands ofvideos, articles, and interactive coding lessons - all freely available to the public. We also havethousands of freeCodeCamp study groups around the world.Donations to freeCodeCamp go toward our education initiatives, and help pay for servers, services,and staff.