We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Courtney Reed a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Courtney , appreciate you joining us today. Crazy stuff happening is almost as certain as death and taxes – it’s technically “unexpected” but something unexpected happening is to be expected and so can you share a crazy story with our readers

I have had two really interesting situations to occur to me since the launch of Kinky Kouture. In 2020-early 2021 Rose vibrators were very popular to the point that if I announced that my inventory was restocked they were sold back out within 48 hours.

One evening I had a potential customer chat to request a discount. I advised him that none were available at the time and asked if he had any specific questions about the item in question. This gentleman began to curse me out and tell me they were “cheap, POS items from China so there was no reason that I could not offer him a discount.” I reiterated that we were not currently running a sale and encouraged him to sign up to our email list to be notified of upcoming promotions. Because he continued to be abrasive in his communication I advised him that I would be ending the chat. As a business owner you naturally are in business to make a sale/profit but it simply was not worth the headache from this specific customer.

More recently I had a gentleman connect to chat and ask me, “So how do we do this?” My response was,”Do what?” Then it dawned on me-he thought my site offered online cybersex for a fee. How he came to this conclusion is beyond me but it gave me a good laugh. I informed the gentleman that my store was an online sex boutique and asked if he had any questions about any of the products offered on the site. He disconnected our chat.

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?

Kinky Couture is a woman and minority owned online sex boutique founded in 2020. Our customers range from 18 to well into their 80s. We offer sexual health and wellness devices for customers of all abilities and take huge pride in our range of adaptive toys (voice activated) for our differently abled customers.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

I funded my business the way many individuals do-through money earned from a primary job. I was actually working two full-time jobs: one to pay my bills (private sector0-finance) and the other (government) to fund my business.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

While I own my domain (www.kinkykouture.com) I use the Shopify platform to sell my products. One of the things I love about Shopify is that the interface is very user friendly so I didn’t need to outsource the building of my website. Everything I needed was there (templates already coded and ready for use).

This is see as a pro and a con: When orders are placed on the website, you are able to select shipping options. Instead of the fee immediately coming out, at the end of the month you are billed based on the amount of times you purchased a shipping label. You could have had a great month business-wise but needed to pour the profit back into the business for inventory. Not knowing immediately how much you owe until your bank account is drafted can leave you in the negative if you are not careful. My advice is to make sure you keep track of how much you have spent in shipping and be sure that money is in that bank account no later than the 25th of each month.

Con: Shopify charges you a fee for using other payment options such as Sezzle, PayPal, etc. You are being double charged which is a headache from an accounting standpoint when it is time to do taxes.

Con: Shopify only keeps 90 days worth of transactions which doesn’t help during tax time.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kinkykouture.com
• Instagram: kinky_kouture
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/kinkykouturellc
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/kinkykouture
• Twitter: @kinkykouturellc

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