Final Post!!!!

Woah! I can’t believe how quickly the past eleven weeks (of Project #1) have flew by. It is really remarkable to see how much my entrepreneurial idea has developed. When I first began developing my idea, I really didn’t know quite what I wanted. I just knew that I wanted a thrift store. I love fashion and thrift stores have always been a personal favorite of mine. Being from Maryland, there are not many thrift store options so my idea was to create an online thrift store in order to make thrift store clothing more accessible to avid thrifters online.

The competitive analysis blog post really made me reevaluate how I planned on setting myself apart from the masses. In my competitive analysis blog post, I analyzed stores such as The Kissing Tree Vintage and ModCloth. From the Kissing Tree Vintage, I learned the importance of having a niche. For example, the Kissing Tree Vintage “niche” is thrifted items from the 80s and 90s. Modcloth, on the other hand, is vintage-inspired and has a very large demographic ranging from the college student to the working woman. What I like about ModCloth is they sell regular retail clothing, but they also include a ‘thrift’ store component to their store. What ModCloth also showed me is the importance of Internet marketing. Yup, even I got schooled in social media!

Social Media is such an important part of marketing today. It really is here to stay and to quote my favorite cartoon Bugz Bunny, “If you can’t beat em’, join ‘em!” I’ve never been big on using social media for personal use, but it is something I plan to take advantage of with my online store. Little things like creating a Facebook “like” page for your brand or a twitter can help increase connectivity between you and your consumers. I believe customer service is essential to the success of a brand. Consumers want to feel wanted. They want to feel important. It is important to address their needs and concerns in order to show that you care. The more customers you satisfy, the more likely they will share your brand with others.

Who says appearance isn’t important? The lecture on Photoshop really helped me to understand the importance of design within my idea. If my web store is well… ugly, then not only will people not buy, but they also may not even take a chance to browse. I personally do not hesitate to click out of web sites if they are untidy and disorganized.

Believe it or not, I actually do plan on making my idea a reality. This summer, I plan on taking the steps necessary to start up my own business centered around my long time interest in fashion. What I realized over the course of this project is that I still need to do more research about vintage fashion. I may not start off with thrifted clothing, but with hand made accessories instead. Depending on how well I do, I plan on expanding to clothing. One of the tips I learned from ModCloth is to start small and then grow. I already have a growing checklist of things I would need to do. For example, I would need to do create a domain, create a layout (or hire someone) for my web store, take quality pictures of the items I am selling, implement an e-commerce system, etc. The list of things to do is long, but I am excited about my potential business. I really had fun developing my idea over the course of this blog. It will be interesting to see my idea come to life.

Best of luck to my fellow entrepreneurs!

Catch you later~