We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cansu Onomay Erden, Burcu Onomay Celik N/A a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Cansu Onomay Erden, Burcu Onomay Celik thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?
We thought about a lot of different names that will reflect our designs but at the end we wanted our name to be very unique. Myono comes from our last names Onomay. We reversed it a little bit and changed the pronunciation. We loved it because it reflected us, our name and our history.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
We both knew in our hearts that someday we will do something together. Since our childhood we have spent most of our holidays in nature in Assos (a town in Turkey’s northern Aegean coast). There was a stone scientist and gemologist who takes out his own stones from all over the world and showing the mesmerizing raw stones to us during summer with explaining the process, their features. We were so impressed with the stones that we were sure we were going to do something with them. We were sure we wanted to something handmade. Burcu has incredible hand skills and she thought of using one of the oldest knotting technique macramé and combine it with gemstones. So, we tried hundreds of different designs. We researched and worked for months and months. Our main goal is to present unique designs that reflects the beauty of nature and gemstones. Cansu was strong at marketing and PR side of the brand. So, we started to grow over time, expanded our portfolio.
One of the things that we are proud of our company is that we do everything in-house. We do product photography, we do social media, we do craft shows, we do marketing. So, we can easily say that everything in our brand is all handmade.
Of course, it hasn’t been a smooth road for us. Jewelry market is very big and getting bigger every day. There are lots of jewelry brands with low quality materials and higher prices. We think that the hardest thing is to do is make your own unique designs and stand out from all these vendors with high-quality materials. But after our customers started to know us they saw our quality and uniqueness.
We always tried to do original and unique designs. We have learned from each comment, good or bad. We’re finally back to where we are now. We continue to grow and learn.
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
I think the most effective strategy is sincerity. In most of our events, we always try to explain the gemstones, their meanings, the designs and our brand. People want to hear our story. Besides that, we use email marketing to give information about our new products, new events or campaign.
Any advice for managing a team?
In today’s world, it’s really hard to keep your morale high. When we consider the economic turmoil in the world, it is getting harder and harder to survive in the business world. Firstly, we are very confident in our work and our products. We try to do unique pieces that our customers will have forever. So, we believe in what we do. Also, as a small business, we encourage everyone to support and shop from small businesses. It is very powerful thing to help one and another. This is how we keep our morale high.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.myonojewelry.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/myono_jewelry
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MYONOJEWELRY
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/myonojewelry
Image Credits
All of the images are copyrighted by Myono Jewelry