How did you start your business? How did you start this business from scratch? How did you start?
How did you start and how did you get customers to know you? And how long did it take you to get famous? How did you start? I have no idea where to begin. Hi guys, my name is Tina Nguyen.
I'm the founder of XXL scrunchie. I launched my small business in January 2020 in my tiny 400 square foot apartment. Like my bed was right here and the stove was right beside it.
The bathroom was just like a skip away. I was so small. And today, Today, we operate out of our 5,000 square foot warehouse. We're almost four and a half years old, which is crazy. Since starting our journey and my small business, I just thought I would be, you know, selling scrunchies, but I've been asked so many questions since I've started, like the ones you saw at the beginning of the video, and I still get them to this day.
And it's so hard for me to answer something like that in a comment back to someone. So I thought I would make this video. and finally answer that question.
How did I start my small business? How I began selling and shipping online? What I did in the beginning, my mistakes, and what I would do differently now. Because guys, I made a lot of mistakes.
I hope what I share today will give you the tools or maybe even the inspiration to start today because you literally can. Because if I did it, you can too. This is also kind of like the story of how starting a small business transformed my life.
I's- I now gave me something I love doing. I allowed me to also get closer to my parents because at the beginning, I asked for their help and then I moved home with them and took over their house. We got a lot closer, especially during the pandemic. All we were doing was we're all making scrunchies together in their house.
This video is going to explain exactly how I got started, including the credentials you need, an email you need, platforms. You might want to post your website on. The cost. How to even get a website and what that really entails and even the domain name. How to ship an order and sell online.
I'm also gonna share what I would do differently in each of those moments because I would have done it a lot differently with hindsight as a benefit. Starting a small business I know can be really daunting because at first I did say no. My cousin, when I made her the first scrunchie as a gift, she told me to start as a business and I said no.
I was like, that's crazy. Like, where do I even begin? I was like, I'm gonna start with that.
Just the word starting a business sounds like so much work, but I'm really gonna break it down for you guys So I hope that it can really inspire at least one person to know that they can start too because the benefits truly are life-changing you have the opportunity to be your own boss to make your own hours and Mainly in the thing I love about it is creating something that's truly my own the other night I'm looking up these new samples and designing these other products and picking new fabrics for our next next collection drop and I was like I love that I get to pick all of this for my store and I get to build things for like our brand and art. We have a team that is believes in it too. And the community, our community, I'm really grateful for. Basically, the sky's the limit because I started with one XXL scrunchie.
Now we have mini scrunchies, XXS scrunchies. We just launched hair bows. We have hair claw clips in three sizes.
We're going to launch more sizes. I launched a beach towel with my artwork. We have tote bags with my artwork. I designed. all the packaging, the sky is the limit when you have a small business or when you're an entrepreneur.
And if they ordered two, I would scan it twice. If they ordered this one, I would scan... Hope you guys don't mind, I'm just going to be elasticking scrunchies to make the most of my time. As some of you may know that I usually do that. This video is going to explain exactly how I started my small business, what things cost me when I started, the way I went about things, how I learned what I learned, and I think the most valuable thing about this is what I would have done differently.
Feel free to learn from my mistakes that I like to call life lessons. But I hope you do know that starting a small business is daunting. I is scary.
And you are like exposing yourself. But the benefits are life-changing because you really do get to have something of your own that you built, that you control, that you get to grow into whatever size that you want to grow it into. If you want a 20,000 square foot warehouse, you could get it one day. You could build it up to that. Let's get into it now.
What did I get ready before I launched my small business? So from the moment, if some of you don't know, it was December. 2019 where I made a scrunchie out of one of my mom's old shirts, gifted it to my cousin and she told me to start as a business. I'm gonna be sharing from what happened the moment I decided to start the small business until I launched it and there was about like a two-week period in between the launching of it and the day we decided it was gonna happen.
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So what did I get ready before? One, the business name. I'm going to list all the points and then we'll go through the points in detail together. Business name. So we came up with XXL and then I decided to call it XXL Scrunchie.
And then I didn't, I knew one day I wanted to grow it to more than scrunchies. So I decided the website name XXLandCo.com because I didn't want it to be XXLScrunchie.com because that would be confusing for future customers when we don't just sell scrunchies. A business email.
So you'll need your one, business name, two, business website, three, business email. You need an... address.
You need to have an address for if packages get returned to you, you need to have that address somewhere. And just for legal purposes, you need to I need to have an address. So at that time I had entered my parents address as the business address Everything was my parents address. Another question you might have is do I need to give my home address?
If I'm starting my small business from home answer is like yes and no. I did want to do a P.O. box because I did feel the same concerns as you like oh my god I don't want to give out my home address.
P.O. boxes I think don't accept like big packages like big bigger ones and and you'll probably be ordering supplies and it's just more of a hassle to go there than to just get packages delivered to your home and have your home address as the address. I's way more convenient. Nothing ever really happened to us if that makes you feel any better.
You need a logo. So this is where it was easier for me. Before I started at XXL Scrunchie, I was a graphic designer and that was what I thought I was going to pursue, doing graphic design and painting murals. So I had the graphic design skills to brand everything I needed and even make my website. So you're gonna need a logo but if you aren't familiar with graphic design as not everyone can just pull that out of their I don't know bag of tricks, you might need to hire a designer if you want a custom logo or just make a simple one on Canva.
Canva is a free app and you could just make a really really simple logo. They have logo templates you could choose from and then customize your own logo. But you're gonna need a logo because that's how brands, that's how customers recognize you by your logo. I's all part of the branding which is incredibly important for building your business in your community for your customers and be recognizable as you grow.
You need photography and photos and you need so for social media this is what our profile photo is and that's what it's been since the beginning. So that's why you need a logo for your profile photo and you need photos because I'll get to that. So photos you do not need to get a fancy photographer at first. Starting out I did not have a photographer and i don't regret that i did have a nikon camera but the iphone takes just as good photos now so you'll need to have photos so that before you launch have a couple photos posted already on your instagram page that when you launch your instagram page isn't just blank and it has some product pictures on there already so people can find and look at it so that's why you need photos i just went in my condo building there was like a there's like one of those amenities rooms that everyone can rent and use so i just went there with all my scrunchies and and took photos on the table. And I remember I had a pillow like this and it was white and fuzzy.
I'll have to find the photos. I would just put scrunchies on there and take the picture. I would put the camera on timer, put my arm in front and take the picture.
Or if I was taking a picture in my own hair, I would set the timer on camera and then run pose, go back, change the scrunchie and go again. And that's what I did for like the first year. So if you're just starting, just use your phone or whatever you have and make sure you have.
good lighting. or your photos. You also need to write your about me bio for on your website and a little blurb about yourself.
You'll need to insert those blurbs about yourself basically everywhere on all your social media pages that you make on your website. Just you're gonna need that so be prepared to pre-write that. You will also need social media handles and you'll want them to be consistent. So you'll need Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter.
Just letting you guys know I don't think Twitter allows dots in between because on Instagram Instagram where xxl.scrunchie but on Twitter where xxl underscore scrunchie. So keep that in mind when you're making your handles. By the way, if you already have a website up and running and you kind of just want marketing tips, how to grow your small business and get sales, you can watch one of these videos I already made and then when you're done.
If you haven't done that and you finished this video, you can watch that next. So I have you guys prepared and ready to go. So point number one, registering your small business. You, like according to the law that I don't know very well, you need to register when you start making income. You need to claim that income somehow through your business.
So at the time, I was already a sole proprietor. By the way, I'm based in Ontario, Canada. So these rules may not apply to where you're living, but it should be a similar vibe.
But this is again what I did. At the time, I was a mural artist and graphic designer. So I already was a sole proprietor.
And what that means is a sole proprietor, also known as a sole proprietor, sole tradership, individual entrepreneurship, or proprietorship is a type of enterprise owned and run by one person. No legal distinction about who owns the business."So what does that even mean? Me reading that I barely can understand what that means. A quick rundown, I'm not an accountant so please go see one if you need accounting advice. I recommend you actually start talking to one once you start getting sales or even before to help you prepare and plan. They'll give you tips for success down the road which also they could also give you advice on if you should be sole proprietor or do corporation. I wish I went sooner. That's one of my biggest regrets not going to see an accountant because they could have saved me more money and helped me be better prepared and understand my finances way better and earlier. But basically sole proprietor is when you're just the owner and you're not not a corporation and so you're getting paid directly to your personal income. is you. When you're a corporation, the business gets paid and then you are an employee but also the owner of the business. So it's a little bit separated. Benefits to both but when you're starting, I think most people just start out as a sole proprietor and then once you're making more money, just to be long story short, once you're making more money then you incorporate. But it depends on what business you're in as well. So please talk to an accountant about that depending on what your business is and... Registering for the business itself was super easy. I think Bruce needs to go outside. Registering was super easy. I went on OWNR.com and registered. I think I paid like $10 or something. And then that was it. I was registered. Now that you're legally registered, you're probably wondering, now what? How do I sell online? Next step is step two, choosing a platform or website. This is what I'm going to explain what I did versus what I wish I did earlier. I had my portfolio website for my murals on Squarespace. My website was called graphictina.ca, so I thought I would make it graphictina.ca slash shop. So that's how I launched my website. I was people went to graphictina.ca slash shop and they bought scrunchies from Squarespace website. However, I now host my website on shop. Shopify, which I wish I did sooner because it's just a better shopping experience for your customers and for you. I has so many customizations for what you need, such as managing your inventory. You can do it on Shopify. Shopify can connect to thousands of different apps to customize your store. For example, right now I'm working with this app to make a custom cart that allows for tiered rewards. If a customer orders $50, they'll get a free keychain. or to the next tier they would get free shipping at $99 and then the next year they would get a free gift again at $150. You can't do that on Squarespace unless you have... I don't even know if you can. No, I don't think you can't. And there's detailed shipping settings you can change. Just Shopify, the best, one of the best platforms for small business, e-commerce, selling things online. But you're probably wondering how do I set up my Shopify? So you're going to need a website name. With Shopify you can just sign up. and then with Shopify you can buy a package to also pick your website name. I already bought my name on GoDaddy.com. Buying a domain name is literally buying like XXLandCo.com or XXLScrunchy.com. That is a domain name. So I already pre-purchased that and then I connected it with my Shopify platform that I also bought separately. So there's your website platform and you need your website name. I wish I started off with Shopify. would have saved me so much time because I did everything on I did everything on Squarespace and then I had to do double the work to re-upload back to Shopify. By the way my friend Lauren from Clos Design Studio designed my website and created the template for me for me to drop in when I need it and I've edited it since but if you need a website designer, I highly recommend her. We used to work together and we still work together to this day. By the way there are monthly fees for Shopify and GoDaddy. In regards to setting up your email because you're gonna need a business email to log into all of these and create one for customers replying back to you, I would just start off with the Gmail. Like that's what I did and then once you grow you can make your own personal custom email because that also costs money and I'm aware that you know not everyone when you're starting you want to save as much money as possible and I don't think what an email is that important to have like the custom one. I think it is now for branding purposes but before I held off a bit too. Details you might want to go through when you're getting your website set up. Filling in all the company details. You'll have to fill in right terms and conditions for your site. Honestly what I did was look at other sites and then rewrite one version of my own. You'll have to write a return policy if you have one. Cover all your bases. You'll need to upload products, photos, and descriptions for whatever you're selling. let people know where exactly you ship to and in Shopify You can set which countries exactly you ship to because right now we don't ship worldwide. Well we do but the worldwide ones cost a lot. But we're working on getting a better rate for worldwide shipping. Only to set up your cart checkout, upload your logo into the website. You'll need to add an about page and a contact page for people who go to your website and might want to ask you a question. You can even look at my website as a skeleton if you want to see what pages you should include for your site. Now you've got your website name, your platform setup, you're registered. Just a bit more detail about Shopify, it's where your website's hosted. So this is what my website looks like when I want to edit it for a new launch day. I's pretty easy once you look into it and actually open it. Before Shopify seemed like this crazy app that was only for coders but it's pretty user-friendly. I highly recommend you just open it, take a look and it'll just make you feel way better. You can also customize your cart and your checkout page which is going to be really important for customers actually checking out and making a purchase from you. Okay let's pretend you have your website set up. How do you ship orders? This is where I was so confused and you might laugh at what I used to do. I initially had no idea how to ship anything. I would ship letters to people like the most I used to do was mail letters like I never shipped anyone. anything back in the day. I was just so expensive to me to go ship to people things. But when I first got my orders with XXL scrunchie, I remember just setting up and saying shipping cost people $5 so I just was charging people five dollars and I would pack up all their packages and then when I made my first little trip to the post office Canada Post I had like an arm full of packages and I hand wrote each person's address and like taped it onto each package meanwhile they like reprint their own slip so like handwriting it was a big waste of time so I had my handful of packages that I hand wrote the addresses on and you know how long some people's names are took me forever and then I would write it obviously super nice because like These were my first orders and I was so grateful that people like were ordering scrunchies from me from my little apartment I showed up shipping an order to someone in toronto who lived in an apartment So I obviously couldn't deliver it myself, but it was also like way across town. So like an hour cost 15 Plus tax and then all the orders. I remember one was like too big of a dimension. So it was like 30 Shipping is crazy expensive guys. That was my huge mistake. I wish if I measured the package you can enter the package dimensions and the weight on Shopify and they give you a slightly discounted shipping rate. So that's what I discovered after you can just print the labels from home because I was taking the bus to go from my apartment to the post office and I would have to bundle up because it was winter I had to put all my boots and my coat wait for the bus get on the bus get off the bus Go inside, be all sweaty from wearing so many layers, and then go wait for the bus again. And wait in line at the post office. There was always a line. So I could have saved a lot of time pre-printing my slips from home. Now what we do is we actually have a commercial. account with Canada Post. The only reason I got it was because I got a call from a rep and they offered it to us. So I don't know how you can get it but I'm sure you could call someone to ask if you're... because we do still ship with Canada Post. I's not like $30 a package. Some of them are when they weigh a lot, which just means the customer order a lot. But yeah, shipping, you're going to come across like how unbelievably expensive it is within for Canada to ship elsewhere. I think in the States, it's more reasonable. I don't know. That's what I've heard. By the way, a big mistake I made was before in Shopify, you can pre-enter the weights of items. So I would weigh each scrunchie and put in the weight. But then as our business grew, we started having different packaging options. options and I didn't for some packages I didn't incorporate what the package weight would be so I would just pre-print all our shipping labels because everything was pre-weighed by product and then one day we had like hundreds of orders taken back to us because all the weights were off by like 10 to 20 grams or something and that makes a price difference so we had to like re-stick and re-enter in all those packages and reprint all the labels but again shipping with a platform online or having a commercial account or a small business account or shipping and printing labels online with Shopify. I believe some people use ClickShip I've heard of and Stallion Express and use them instead of going directly to like UPS. or DHL or FedEx because those people, those shipping companies directly are really expensive if you go right to them. Just a tip I've recently learned. Another cool thing about Shopify is you can set up shipping zones so for Customers I have in Canada and USA, they get free shipping for over $99 Canadian. And in Europe, they get free shipping for over $150. So you can set up little customizations like that. And you can place test orders. So another, I guess. green flag for using Shopify as your platform. The next step we, I wish I did sooner, that we do now that I didn't do it in the beginning was to use ShipStation which is where you guys probably see us printing out our packing slips. ShipStation allows you to print out packing slips. On Shopify if you print out a packing list it's only organized in alphabetical order. on ShipStation, you can organize them by these SKUs that we enter per product. So our products in our warehouse, if you walk around, they're organized by alphabetical SKUs. So the first products are our hair pouches, cotton pouches, then it's XXL scrunchies, so that when we're picking our orders, we can go in a workflow. Instead of going, oh, the product's here, and then, oh, we have to go all the way on the other side for the next product. But if a customer orders it, it will be in an alphabetical list in that. order of the path we walk when we pick orders. ShipStation allows you to do that. I explain it more further in depth in another video but I'd recommend once you get more than maybe 10 products you can look into using ShipStation to help you organize when you're packing your orders because you want to be the most time efficient possible to save time where you can because I've never realized how precious time is until I started my small business. I also allows us to make barcodes and scan items to verify them like this. This one's so pretty. Say two more colors and take them out. Because when I used to pick orders, I, even if people would order two of things, I would circle the number two. I would still like, human error would occur. So now we can rely on this verification shipping system. And I tried to look it up before. because I always was making errors and I was like I wish there was a way to like scan items and like they tell you if it's right or wrong because if you scan the wrong item it also tells you. I will save you a lot in having an unhappy customer or having to reship. them the correct product. I's just, it's nice to have. Maybe I do wish I had it sooner. Not after a while. I wish I had that way, way sooner. Now I think we've gone through all the steps. One, registering your business. Two, what website platform to use. Three, what you'll need to Fill in your website and on Shopify there's tons of free themes So you can pick a free theme and then input all your stuff in you don't really don't technically need a designer to do it Right away, but to get one to set it up in what makes sense for your business because setting up your site in a user-friendly way is incredibly important for your sales because if a customer is trying to find something on your site and it's not easy you could lose them in just two seconds if it's gonna be hard to buy something and hard to navigate. And even having a designer, graphic designers who specializes in website design, they'll know something like your images you upload should not be 300 dpi. I should be a certain size that's clear enough to see on the computer, but the lowest like size in megabytes or gigabytes that it needs to be. Because it could be taking up wasted space on your website and then slowing your website down. down for no reason when it doesn't need to be that big of an image. And by big I mean like the data size not even like the size. So I would never know that if I wasn't a graphic designer. I'd be like oh it's just a photo I can put it in. No there's so much more to the photo. So much more. Okay next you also have your website domain name now. You now know how to ship orders. which is through your website platform. You just print the label after a customer prints and makes an order, which is amazing. Or you use your shipping provider that you signed up with. For example, like ClickShip or I heard ChitChat. is really good for Ontario. Set up for shipping. Have your packaging. I just used random poly mailers when I first started. I just used whatever I could get as soon as possible. Registering for a shipping account so that you'll have a way to ship things and pay for your shipping fees. And then the last step was ShipStation if you want to set that up for your to get Packing slips and to barcode your items so that you can scan to verify and then scan to print. You can print shipping labels right from ShipStation as well if you set it up. Set up your shipping account in ShipStation. And that's it! That's not it, but those are the bare bones you need to start your business. I didn't even have ShipStation or a shipping account when I started. So technically you don't need those things, but I wish I had those things to save me money and time. Instead I just kind of had to learn from my mistakes, my expensive mistakes, that I wish I had those sooner. Let me know if you have more questions about any of these topics. I'm so happy to help. I was really surprised when I started my small business and have received messages like these that say, you inspired me, I started my small business because of you. I never thought like starting a small business that that would happen and that I would be able to help people. in that way because that's something I've always wanted to do. Help people and give back. Thanks for being here XXL fam members. If you're seeing this scrunchie and it hasn't launched yet, it's part of our summer launch. Summer 2024 and it's going to be limited edition. Comes in all the sizes. Where's XXL? Hit the subscribe button if you like what you heard. Like the video at the bottom if you can to help it get seen more and maybe help at least one more person. If you have have a dream or an idea that you've been wanting to start for a while, take this as your sign to go for it. If you stumbled upon this video, watched it all, take it as a sign to start today because you can. Your chances of success are much higher if you start. Don