the bossbabe podcast - 46. How to Successfully Launch a Product Based Ecommerce Business With Anjulei Aurelio, Head of Product at BossBabe

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

We’re now introducing mini episodes, which are shorter episodes that are super actionable and feature Team BossBabe. BossBabe’s Head of Marketing, Kay Snels, will be your host for this episode where she interviews our very own Head of Product, Anjulei.  Kay and Anjulei dive deep into everything you need to know in scaling a product-based business from the ground up and preparing your e-commerce business for Q4. They share insightful tips and great (actionable) takeaways on how to strategically put together your production timeline, how to map your e-commerce calendar for the holiday season and how to ensure it is all executed well. Sign up to BossBabe’s newsletter for ambitious women: bossbabe.com/allthenews

It's really just having that holistic view and where everyone's working, what teams are working, to making sure that it's executed well. Giving yourself a lot of lead time is really, really ideal when making sure you're dealing with a lot of stakeholders. Welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance, and learning how to balance it all. I'm Kaye Snells, head of marketing at Boss Babe and your host for this week's mini episode. These mini episodes are designed with you in mind. Each episode, a member of Team Boss Babe will dive into one topic, whether that's product, sales, marketing, community, or leadership. So consider

this your weekly mini training that's super actionable so you can implement it right away. In today's episode, I'm going to interview Anjale. She's the head of product at Boss Babe, and I'm so excited to have her on. So prior to Boss Babe, Anjale basically built Young and Reckless, which is a Los Angeles-based e-commerce and omni-channel streetwear company where she learned exactly how to scale a product-based business from the ground up. So today we're going to chat about exactly that. We're going to chat about how to prepare your e-commerce for Q4. So as always, screenshot yourself listening to this podcast and share it on your stories along with your

biggest takeaway tagging at bossbabe.inc and hashtag the boss babe podcast. A boss babe is unapologetically ambitious and paves the way for herself and other women to rise, keep going and fighting on. She is on a mission to be her best self in all areas. It's just believing in yourself. Confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own version of success.

This episode is brought to you by the Boss Babe newsletter. Look, we know you're busy and we know you get a lot of emails. But trust me when I say this is one of those newsletters you actually look forward to. We want to make it super easy for you to get all your inspiration, information and resources in one place. Once a week, we'll share an email with a quick overview of everything you need to know. We share freebies, a recap on our latest podcast episodes, and our favorite blog posts from BossBabe.com. It's the holy grail for ambitious women. If you want to sign up, go to BossBabe.com slash all the news. So with no further ado, welcome. It's your first time on the podcast, Angele.

I know. It's so great to be here. Thank you so much. I'm super excited because I feel like a lot of the information we share is obviously about service-based businesses, but your background in product-based businesses is something that we haven't tapped into previously. And that's why I'm really excited to bring it to our community today. So I just wanted to quickly start by asking you, when did you get into the product-based business game? Oh man, it's been so, so long. I actually started an app called Avatar, and that was a 3D mobile styling tool and a clothing design platform. From there, I ended up getting into Young and Reckless when it was in its infant stages.

And there were a few employees and started off their basic operations and getting that off the ground. So it's been a couple of years, probably like five years just in the business and really learning the back end of everything. Yeah, there's that. That's super, super cool. And I know that you recently did a coaching call on this in the society, which is our membership. So what did you tap in during that conversation? Well, I mean, we started off talking about preparing your e-commerce store for Q4.

And one of the biggest thing is understanding your e-commerce calendar and what that looks like and setting that up for all these exciting events that are coming up, right? You have Black Friday, you have Cyber Monday, you have the holiday season. So there's so much that we need to start preparing for and getting involved in that. So in that coaching call, I went in and talked about basically how do you set up your store, making sure product pages are on point, your tech is on point. And that means, hey, a lot of people shop on mobile, right? So we discussed a lot about how you shop online and what users are looking for during this holiday season to really capture sales.

Really interesting. And so what are people actually looking for, in your opinion? And I know that it's very different, of course, based on the business that you have. But generally speaking, if someone's listening to this and they want to have a quick takeaway, what would you recommend? Well, a lot of shoppers are using mobile right now, right? So a lot of times when you're shopping online, you want to add to cart a specific item. You want to make sure that your website is ready for mobile application. With Amazon, Amazon does such a great job in terms of adding to cart and clicking that buy. So being prepared to make sure that your website is easy, the user face is amazing, the user experience is great, and specific to mobile would be great. Very cool. And so what other ways can people really start to prepare their e-commerce shop for the holiday season? Like

you mentioned something about the calendar, right? How would someone think about mapping out a calendar like that? So there's a lot of people that need to basically be brought in to your team, right? So you have your marketing team, you have your logistics team, and you have your operational team. And one of the biggest things that you need to set up in your calendar is basically your production timeline. sure that it's seamless, and then also putting in the holidays that are coming up. So like I said, Halloween is around the corner. Thanksgiving is around the corner. There's Black Friday, there's Cyber Monday, and there's like the holiday season and putting those in and putting in the promos that you need in the calendar to really execute with your team. So it's really just having that holistic view and where everyone's working, what teams are working to making sure that it's executed well.

Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one platform, Kajabi. You know, I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place. So it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business, you know, get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible.

I definitely recommend Kajabi to all of my clients and students. So if you're listening and haven't checked out Kajabi yet, now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering Boss Babe listeners a 30-day free trial. Go to kajabi.com slash Boss Babe to claim your 30-day free trial. That's kajabi.com slash Boss Babe. I think that's such a good tip and what that reminded me of is the difference between your regular content calendar and also your e-commerce calendar because I feel like with an e-commerce content calendar and regular calendar there's so much more going on right because it's not just mapping out exactly when your content is going out and which things you want to be promoting

that month it's also knowing how much product you have in your fulfillment center and how much more you want to be pushing so I feel like you have to map it out even more weeks and months in advance than with a regular content calendar. So how far in advance do you think someone should map out their calendar? Let's say they want to launch their product on January 1st, 2020. How early would you start with that process? I definitely give it a 60 day turnaround. if you're wanting to do something really quickly. Obviously, giving yourself a lot of lead time is really, really ideal when making sure you're dealing with a lot of stakeholders. Like I said, you have to deal with the marketing team,

you have to deal with your fulfillment center, your web developer, and just making sure that everything is going according to their time and really gauging that cadence, right? At this time, production is coming in, but sometimes production doesn't come in at that date. So now everything needs to get pushed back. And that is the beauty about e-commerce. It's being agile, right? And that's the difference between a lot of other businesses with e-com. There's a lot of promos that need to pop up, right? Okay, there's a 30% deal that we need to execute. And now you have to get the marketing assets ready. Now you have to making sure your inventory is ready for that. So there's a lot of moving parts that goes on in e-com. So making sure

that you are giving enough lead time is really, really key. So in one of the previous episodes with Danielle, I discussed the difference between customer experience and customer service. And so as a quick recap, customer service is very reactive, right? Like something's wrong with your product. Someone reaches out, you know, it's broken or it's damaged, they want to get it replaced. And then customer experience is really preempting what the customer is going to want and that unboxing experience and thinking through the FAQs and everything. So I want you to kind of chat about both in relation to e commerce. Yes, definitely. With customer experience, right? It's all how you

receive the product. You want to make sure at the end of the day that when that customer gets that product that they bought, that they absolutely love it. And what does that look like? So when it comes to your packaging, making sure that the packaging is perfect and that the unboxing experience, as you said, is like an experiential thing for them. And there's little things that you can do. You can do a follow-up email, say, hey, hope you enjoyed your product that you received. Here's a 10% discount. And really just engaging with the customer once they receive that product. That's so key in e-commerce. Another thing too, when it comes to customer service, it's always being there. 24 hours of the day, when someone receives a product, you want to make sure

that your customer service team is there to answer any questions because we don't like an unhappy customer. We want to make sure that they have everything that they wanted. Their whole experience of that product is amazing. So making sure that your customer service team is there to answer any questions, or if there's any issues with their product, they're able to get onto it as soon as possible. So when it comes to enjoying a product, you want to make sure that the team behind that product is there so that you have higher retention and you keep coming back and buying more products? I think there were a lot of takeaways there and I want to take it one step

further with my final question. So there's a lot of people listening to this that are a one woman show and they might be interested in launching a product or having an e-commerce shop, whatever that looks like. But I know that behind the scenes, there's so many people involved in pulling that off. So how do you do that with a very low budget? And how do you do that as a one-woman show? Do you need to hire? Are there other ways to do it? I think you have so much experience in this. I think this would be a great learning for a lot of people listening. You know what? If you have an idea, you can launch a product today, to be quite honest.

All you need is a Shopify store or any platform like an e-commerce platform that you want to use. There's so many templates that are up on those sites where it's easy for you. There's no need for a web developer. You can just pop in photos that you can take. Have a great camera. Take really good photos of the product that you want to launch. Upload that. Set your pricing. I mean, it doesn't get difficult unless you want to scale it. So when you get into the idea phase and you just want to launch a product, start up your e-commerce website. These platforms are pretty cheap. They're like $30 a month at the starting level. Upload your pictures, create a product profile, and then just set it up. I think in that initial stage of just setting up is great, just as long as you have the

product that you want to sell and you go from there. Now, if we're trying to get more difficult and starting to do product development, and there's Now, if we're trying to get more difficult and starting to do product development, and there's a lot more intricacies in that process, creating that product, figuring out what manufacturers to use. But definitely, there are so many women and just so many people that are actually launching e-commerce websites at their home with just a one person show. And then when they want to get into that scaling side, that's when you start adding more people. When you're thinking about doing 10,000 units, 50,000 units, 100,000 units, then of course, definitely recommend getting a team.

But when it comes to just having your one person show, you know what, set up your ecommerce store really quickly, get all that information that you need, and then launch it and get feedback from people. I think that was so key. I think a lot of people enjoyed that and were very inspired and are just gonna get off this podcast, go straight to Shopify or whatever platform they want to launch their store on and just get started. I think that's the best way to do it. 100%. So I would love to bring Anjalee back on. And if anyone is listening with a product-based business, that's like, yes, girl, you're speaking my language. I need to know a lot more about this. I would love

it if you could tag us in this episode, you can just take a screenshot, do at case nows. And can you also spell your handle out for listeners on July? Yeah, it's at a n j u l e i. And that would be really great if you can send over those screenshots and let us know what you would like to hear more on the next episode. So thank you so much for being on this episode on July. And it was your first one. What did you think? Amazing. I am so excited to be on this podcast. You are an amazing host. Thank you so much. Oh my god, thank you. Okay, bye. If you loved this episode, please subscribe, download a few other ones, and be sure to leave us a review. I want to hear what you enjoyed what your main takeaways were and i also really want to know which topics you'd like us to cover next

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