Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Aneesha Smith, RNC. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Aneesha , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
Reflections by Zana How we started and how we were forced to pivot and grow.
“My first business, Reflections by Zana, was actually started through an idea of being artistic and starting an Etsy store. I knew I wanted to run a business. I knew I was very creative. I knew I liked working with my hands. And I also had two young daughters who were very artistic at the time. They loved to draw, drawing inspiration from cartoons and emulating little characters. Being a black mom with black daughters, and not having a whole lot of inspiration for them, I decided to open an Etsy store painting wooden figures of little girls with their hair in an afro puff.
I would make these different iterations of little wooden dowels, painting them so you could frame them or display them. I made paper backgrounds and that’s where everything started. I had a great time doing it and promoted it to my friends and coworkers. But it was very slow-moving at the beginning.
One night, I was out with a nursing friend and she asked how the business was going. I told her, and she said, ‘Okay, well, have you ever thought of maybe using these little wooden art pieces as badge reels for us to wear to work?’ I hadn’t thought of that, but it wasn’t a bad idea, so I decided to try it.
I reached out to the wood manufacturer to get smaller 3-inch wooden pieces made. Once I received the wood, I developed a process for making them small. I was able to perfect not only painting but also customizing. I released my first few badge reels on Etsy in early 2016.
At first, I just had one product with variation options to pick hair color, headband color, and add glittery letters for the profession like ‘RN’ or ‘MD.’ I had the process down but hadn’t really mass-promoted it beyond some organic social media reach.
Then one day, I started getting sales one after another, continuously for 24 hours straight. Where was this traffic coming from? I messaged customers asking if they had shared it anywhere, and one customer said she had shared it in the Facebook group ‘Black Nurses Rock’ which had thousands and thousands of members at that time.
That’s where my business really took off and became something able to produce an emotional connection with the products. I had to take off work to fill all the orders, just me painting and running around getting supplies. It verified my idea. From then on, it was just up.
We continued getting daily sales. I invested profits into customized letters and wood types. I expanded into making badges for different organizations. For about three years, it was a singular product business.
Eventually, we got into art commission work and expanded to more actual products in a slow, rolling process. I started vending at events with a colorful display, selling to our primary audience of professional black women.
Then COVID hit in 2019, halting our plans for vending events. We had to redirect the entire business to focus on the customers who were already proven to appreciate badge reels – people like me, nurses wearing them at the bedside.
We doubled down on that, creating four different badge materials and styles. We pushed those on Etsy and Shopify, and that’s how we sustained and actually grew through COVID. I developed manufacturing relationships then, applying what I had learned.
Now we use three main materials and I don’t paint anymore since it became a bottleneck crampingmy hands. But we reinvested and grew, breaking into new platforms like Amazon.
It started with me wanting to paint relatable artwork with my daughters, showing little black girls they had muses too. It ended with an entire movement of grown professional women feeling seen, just through something as small as a badge reel. That’s our origin story – touching an audience you never thought would see the impact and purpose behind what you were doing at the time.”
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
“As the nurse behind Reflections by Zana, a family run small business, I was able to marry serving as a product brand and ecommerce brand with healthcare, without actually having a healthcare-related business directly. What makes us unique is that Reflections by Zana provides representation of different cultural backgrounds of nurses and other healthcare professionals through our accessories – that is our main brand.
I’ve also expanded into our sister brand, Pro Badge Reels, which allows for a more targeted approach to customize work accessories, primarily ID badge reels, for organizations, events, students and clients dealing specifically in healthcare. We really use what we’ve built with Reflections by Zana to serve other businesses and organizations at a customized, wholesale, bulk purchase level or corporate gifting level.
Infusing quality and customer service into all our offerings really sets us apart. People often see badge reels as disposable, but the badge reel industry is actually a quiet giant market. Thousands of vendors sell some creativity or representation in this space, and we’ve been able to enter, hold our position, and grow while also serving organizations that may not have thought customized badge reels were possible for them.
On top of that, I started ‘Your Ecomm Strategist’ to further bring technology into businesses, creativity into ecommerce and online selling, and design services. I can serve anyone from a small healthcare accessories business owner looking to grow online, or even the med-spa owner with no tech experience, because I’ve made connections in ecommerce, tech, manufacturing, accessories, graphic design, web design – we offer all those services now, plus I am passionate education of my clients and them educating their clients and customers.
It’s amazing that even as an ecommerce business and creative design agency run by a nurse, we’ve stayed in the healthcare service lane, bringing tech, innovation and creativity to those in and out of healthcare. Yet Reflections by Zana is still its own brand available across Etsy, Amazon, Shopify, and social platforms with unique, creative designs not sold anywhere else unless through our resellers.
I’m extremely proud of the ways you can work with us – whether gifting our products, using our services to start or grow your own ecommerce business in healthcare or not, or having me consult since I’ve worked both the bedside and tech/product lanes. A lot of nurses don’t get into the digital product creation and selling side as a profession or business, so I’ve been able to extend that knowledge. That’s something I take great pride in.”
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
“Understanding the customer journey and making sure we did our absolute best to overdeliver on that experience from buying to answering questions to packaging, the safety of their product, how it arrived to you, what our return rates are and refund rates, and, you know, fixing problems as they arise—that’s what helped us build our reputation.”
Committing to selling only high-quality products and working with manufacturers that prioritized quality control allowed us to ensure our customers received an excellent product.
We aren’t about cutting corners or not investing in a long-lasting quality product—those were the things that, as we sold more and more, we made sure to choose vendors and manufacturers that understood quality and did quality checks. They would replace things we received that were not up to par—we had to make sure we were ensuring the end product was absolutely as high quality as it could be.
And that started to show itself in our customer reviews, as they started taking pictures and tagging us. Those things helped us build a reputation on Etsy, where we gained a 4.9 rating. We are over four stars on Amazon and on our main website, which is extremely hard to do with so many small products typically under $20.
Even as a nurse, I felt like I was able to push that narrative of treating the customer absolutely as if they were your first and last choice every single time. The privilege of doing business is one we take very seriously, and so we treat our customers that way. It has actually paid off because we do have highly rated product reviews from our customers and a lot of enthusiastic repeat customers. Providing remarkable products and that level of remarkable service is what built our reputation in this market.”
How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.
On Being an Omnichannel Seller
“We are omnichannel sellers. That means we sell our brand on many different marketplaces. Currently, we have stores on Etsy, Shopify, Amazon, and TikTok, and we sell the majority of our products with our brand visible and consistent across all marketplaces.
So, a little bit about the pros and cons of each. I would say that when it comes to customer ownership, and what that means is you are able to collect an email or a text message number, a mobile number from your customers and communicate with them, brand build, and offer new products, offers, and sales – you’re able to do that on one platform, and that is Shopify.
With Amazon and Etsy, they own your customer. They supply the automation, the interface, they will have customers typically reviewing, and they will remind them to review. They will send out automation, shipping updates. So in exchange for customer ownership, you get access to the audience that they are bringing to the platform.
That is the biggest difference between a marketplace selling atmosphere, which is you step onto the marketplace, you instantly have access to all of their marketing, everything that they’ve done to bring customers onto that platform. If you know how to properly build your listings, then you can start making sales pretty quickly on Amazon and on Etsy.
Shopify, on the other hand, you have full control of what your customer experiences, how often you talk to them, the reviewing process – everything, it’s full control. But there is no native marketing tool that drives customers to you. So then you become the person that has to do that. And that is the biggest challenge, especially for a small business. It’s a very expensive endeavor, because you do have to run ads or you need to build community so that you can drive traffic – the whole point is to drive traffic to your products.
And so we have found success in utilizing all of them. We are on all the platforms for a reason. Because the way that today’s algorithms work – search algorithms, Google algorithms and Facebook, Instagram algorithms – is that the more exposure you can place in front of a potential customer to your brand, the higher likely it is that they will eventually come to your store and buy from you.
On Amazon, it makes it very easy because Amazon is also a very trusted place for people to buy. So we are there because we know people trust the sellers on the platform. On Etsy, we know people enjoy unique, custom products and because we started that way, we were able to capitalize and become star sellers on that platform. Understanding that their audience is going to be different from our main website – our main site caters specifically to professionals of color but primarily women, but on Etsy and Amazon it’s everybody. So even within our brand, we were able to reach out and touch different audiences based on the platform that we’re selling on.
We also are on Faire, I did not want to leave that out. Faire is the whole selling platform that allows us to do business with other businesses looking to sell our products. So we have a profile there and we do sell our badges and some of our other accessories on that platform. And that platform is just great for more business-to-business exposure.
So with products, I think staying ahead of the game means visibility, and if you don’t have large marketing budgets that you can pour money into one or two channels, then kind of spreading yourself out to maintain brand strength and making sure you keep those same high customer service standards in place – those things will help you grow and then also solidify you as a brand inside of whatever industry you’re currently in or whatever audience that you’re serving.”
Contact Info:
- Website: rbzexpressions.com and probadgereels.com and yourecommstrategist.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/reflectionsbyzana or @yourecommstrategist
- Facebook: facebook.com/reflectionsbyzana or facebook.com/yourecommstrategist
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/your-ecomm-strategist/