HER Empire

I have a love for fashion and had previously worked as a social media coordinator at another online store. I was also passionate about sourcing styles that looked expensive but were affordable as this mirrored my own pain points as a 22 year old consumer at the time.

I also love the freedom of being able to work from home and online means you can essentially run the business from anywhere in the world.

Having just reached my 30s I’m entering a new stage of my life where I am about to get married and start a family. I am also wanting to care for my elderly grandparents a few days a week as they now require full time care. This has required me to step back from work and these combined family reasons has ultimately led to my decision to sell the business.

Currently due to my family circumstances I have only been putting in 20 hours per week to run the business.

This involves customer service, dispatching of orders, social media updates, content creation and stock purchases.

I currently have a freelancer who assists in packing orders, content creation and scheduling of social media (although this could easily be done by me/ new owner to help increase profits if you are happy increase hours to full-time instead of 20 hours per week)

I then freelance out any graphic design work such as edm creation and our paid advertising of facebook, instagram, google and pinterest.

Last year when I was working full time on the business we were experiencing spikes in monthly revenue of 50-88K AUD which is also another reason why this business has untapped potential if the right person was to come along who can dedicate full time hours to build the business up to the 7-8 figures per year it is capable of reaching.

Our ecommerce store has extensive potential for future growth. Currently we do $30,000-$40,000 AUD in monthly revenue on average.

However our average conversion rate is 0.6% which is below average for industry standard so there is definitely a lot of room to grow.

By implementing small changes this 0.6% conversion rate could easily triple which means at least 3x the current revenue/ profit is possible in the immediate future.

1. Implementing the Vitals app will allow you to add cross and upsell product at the checkout to boost average order value and conversion.

2. Website design tweaks to allow US and Canada customers to automatically browse the website and checkout in their local currency rather than AUD will instantly lift the conversion rate.

3. Changing the return policy to accept full refunds rather than a store credit would also improve conversion.

4. Having a return address in the US. This would not only lift the conversion rate significantly but also improve the repeat customer rate for our US market.

The scale ideas listed above have been taken from key current pain points of our customers so I know improving in these areas would be key to extensive growth for the business.

1. On the marketing front the main focus should be on growing the Tik Tok account as this social media platform has the greatest potential for rapid growth.

2. Another area we have yet to use is SMS marketing which could be easily implemented as an add on to our current email strategy using Klaviyo.

3. Influencer marketing is now essential in the fashion industry and we currently don’t have a consistent strategy in place for this sector so building this out would greatly improve organic growth and conversion.

Implementing these above changes would be the key steps to turning this business from 6 figures to 7-8 figures a year.

As I had no prior experience I don’t think any certain skill sets are necessary as long as you are passionate about women's fashion and the ecommerce space everything else can be self taught.

I would also recommend remote freelancers as a great way to keep expenses down as it keeps the business lean and flexible (rather than hiring full time staff) This will allow you to outsource any skill sets you don’t have or don’t enjoy doing day to day.