Once the designer Elena Misnyk saw the legs of a doll that had fallen into it sticking out of a children's book. She thought that this is the perfect bookmark, and today she has her own online store myBOOKmark and a workshop in Kiev, which employs 20 people. Mass media around the world wrote about the unusual bookmarks that Misnyk sold for almost $ 400,000. The girl told AIN. UA about how it all began
Elena Misnyk is 31 years old. She was born and raised in the town of Korop, Chernihiv region, in a house that stood right on the edge of the forest and inspired creativity. Since childhood, she loved tinkering, sewing, building tree houses and constantly disappearing in her father's garage. She graduated from the architectural faculty of the Kiev National University of Civil Engineering and Architecture and tried to work in her specialty, but her love for the profession never woke up.
Then Elena decided to earn money with creativity. In 2011, she founded the Medova Shafa brand and began to make ethnic-style jewelry. I sold them on Etsy and earned pretty good money - it turned out to be about $ 1000 per month. “I still love the works of those times. I invested a lot in them. I think that is why it was an unbearable torment to delegate production to craftsmen at later stages,”Elena said.
Once Misnyk was visiting friends who had small children. Elena looked into the nursery, where creative chaos reigned, and accidentally saw a book with doll legs sticking out. Immediately, the imagination turned on, and the very next day the girl made the first test bookmark from polymer clay and cardboard, decorating it with acrylics.
The designer tested the new product on her jewelry showcase, and although the target audience there was completely different, it went well. I also tried Ebay, Amazon and Fancy, but the demand came from Etsy … “It was already a ready-made traffic of foreign buyers who voted for successful experiments with dollars. Not the first test based on an existing store, but the first one that fired so quickly,”Misnyk recalls.
$ 2 to start
Apart from material costs and time spent on work, Elena invested only $ 2 in starting a new business (Etsy charges a fee of 20 cents for placing one product in the window).
At first, the idea was appreciated by the regulars of the jewelry store on Etsy, then the site administrators paid attention to the bookmarks and included them in their mailings several times. “We also took an active part in promoting within the Etsy platform, thanks to which we often found ourselves on the first page,” says Elena.
The specificity of the product is such that they are not looking for it. You can't look for something that you don't know about yet. Therefore, the main strategy was to simply show our crazy bookmarks to as many people as possible. And the capabilities of Etsy at that time provided us with such an opportunity.
Two months after the first launch, in September 2011, Elena opened her own online store of unusual bookmarks.
A lot of traffic to myBOOKmark comes from social networks, where Misnyk's products are quite popular. The brand has about 60,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram. Mostly from abroad. “We have focused on markets where citizens have high purchasing power. The main countries are the USA and Great Britain,”says Elena. However, in general, bookmarks are sold in more than 90 countries around the world.
From time to time, Elena has lectured on how to work at Amazon, Etsy and other marketplaces to successfully sell abroad. Since launch, Misnyk has sold over 15,000 bookmarks. They all cost $ 25, and the price has never changed. Thus, myBOOKmark sales in cash amounted to approximately $ 370,000.
Marketing
Previously, the main expense of myBOOKmark was the work of the craftsmen - all the bookmarks were made by hand, and even the boxes in which they were sent to customers.
Now that the company has established a technological process, most of the costs are spent on materials and marketing. And marketing for this category of goods is quite peculiar.
Collaboration with influencers works well for myBOOKmark. The company is friends with several dozen book bloggers who are happy to write about the product.
According to Elena's observations, giveaway marketing does not work well for promoting goods, like her bookmarks, but different activities in which participants have to do something - post a thematic photo, come up with a riddle, etc. - work well.
Big team
At the start, Lena had only one assistant-craftswoman, but she did all the most interesting things herself. A month later, the team already consisted of three girls, including Misnyk herself, and today 20 people work in the myBOOKmark workshop in Kiev. “The most frightening when I think about it,” - says Elena.
I searched for people through Facebook. “It was important for me that the team was loyal to my work. I didn't look for artists or sculptors, because I believed that almost every woman who has a penchant for working with her hands (sewing, knitting, embroidery) can do what she needs. And sculptors or painters will add too much of their own to each copy, which means that the client can get something that is different from the photo,”Misnyk explained.
Business is, first of all, a display of its head.
She considers the team one of the most important components of her success. However, first of all, it is a unique product.
Of course, there were a lot of people who wanted to copy Elena's bookmarks - there are about a dozen shops with a similar product on Etsy. They mostly adopt the general idea of a Ukrainian woman, but sometimes they copy models and even steal photos. Such competitors focus on a lower price. However, according to myBOOKmark, the copies are much inferior in quality and look even slightly comical.
Now the team is working on a fundamentally new category of products, which will become a business expansion for Elena. However, what it will be, the craftswoman does not say yet.