My hubby and I recently started a custom designed t-shirts business. We currently are an amazing team of 4.
What We Do
We design and print awesome custom t-shirts for entrepreneurs to help them standout from the competitions and create lasting impression!
How It All Started
We started BibiTees! because we couldn’t find cool t-shirts with standard quality that fit. They were either of very poor quality or the designs were terrific. The ordering process, also, was some difficult task as most printing companies required a minimum order or setup fees and several weeks to deliver. We fixed it.
How We Fixed It
The secret is; we sought to create products that people will love and a brand people can trust. We kept it simple; as everyone could easily design, personalise and print their own t-shirts with no minimum order or setup fees. We offer premium tees with amazing designs and reduced delivery time. We made it a culture to wow every single customer that comes to us.
We got a mail from a customer after ordering a customised t-shirt and that got us very emotional to be honest.
For some minutes, we found ourselves pondering over that mail. All our sleepless nights, everything we’d been doing, all the resources, time, and energy we’d put into the business and the work for our customers, was justified by that single mail.
What began as a passionate venture to meet a need with our little ideas and talent soon grew faster than we could imagine. Within few months, we’ve grown the business to a reasonable level though we yet learn and improve every step of the way. We recently secured our office space, got our own state of the art advanced technology DTG printer to have total control of the entire value chain of the business. Maybe we couldn’t have reached this level without the support of some wonderful guys right in this forum, but for their selfless support and service. We’re grateful.
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Here are a few takeaways in our journey so far. I chose to share my story just to encourage anyone feeling down about their business or not deriving satisfaction as they’d hoped. Hoping this story gives some glimmer of hope.
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People can no longer accept average or poor quality products or services. Anyone not offering some optimal service or product wouldn’t survive in this new market paradigm. All entrepreneurs should always deliver more quality.
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Make your customers happier through better customer service
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Invest only on what really matters. Customer experience. Training of team members
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When you treat your customers rightly, they’ll have one option; return for more. Such repeat customers usually help you do the advertising to their friends and all, through word of mouth.
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See phone calls to your customers as a main relationship element.
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Identify intrinsic deficiencies of the business model. In other words know what is wrong in your current strategy and see how that can be changed. When we started, we had our own designs we wanted to sell but we quickly realized that customers preferred their own customized designs. We had to modify our business model.
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Surprise your customers sometimes. In other words, wow them.
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Sometimes you have to give up immediate profits to build relationships. For example, when a customer complained about receiving the wrong order, we asked the customer to keep that order .while we send a new order to him or her with free shipping. Wow experience.
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The importance of personal development and growth cannot be over-emphasized. working on personal skills, building and development of the entire business team is key to success.
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Never stop learning, never stop improving and always consider your customers happiness first.
I wouldn’t end this post without stating that majority of our sales come from our social media platforms.
If you’re not embracing or leveraging the power of social medial into your business plan, you may still have some struggles in 2017 and beyond. Things are rapidly changing in consumer behaviours. You have to take your products or services to where your consumers are. You can achieve this by creating good contents, through advertising etc…
In the coming days, I’ll post our ad targeting blueprint; maybe someone will get inspired and be motivated for what 2017 holds for this our nascent ecosystem.
Shalom!
