We recently connected with Dzuy Linh and have shared our conversation below.

Dzuy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today 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?

When our daughter was learning to walk, we wanted to have a push walker to help her but didn’t want more plastic toys that would quickly get discarded once she learned to walk. So I decided to design and make one myself in our garage. We prototyped a bunch of different designs and eventually came to one we really liked. It was sturdy, well-balanced, and looked pretty good too! I thought it’d be fun to put it on Etsy and see if other people would want to buy one. Within a day, we got our first order and kind of had to scramble to figure out how to build another one! A couple days later, we got another order and then another and just kept building. Pretty soon, the holidays came and orders came pouring in and that’s when we knew we were onto something.

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.

By trade, I’m a product manager and former engineer so it wasn’t out of character for me to go and make our push walker when we couldn’t find one we really liked. We applied our many years of product development experience to create something for our own children and I think that resonates with other parents. We pay attention to every detail of the product because it has to be great enough to give to our own children. That means it has to look and feel inviting while also being safe and sturdy. We’re against short-lived plastics so we only use high-quality, sustainble birch wood, designed to last for a long time with zero plastics anywhere on the walker. It’s got a cargo area in the front so children can keep using it as a storage for toys long after they learn to walk. It’s designed to last and even be passed to the next generation.

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

We started off on Etsy because it’s really easy to create something and post it for sale as a one-off custom item. The audience on Etsy loves handmade products so for us, it’s a great way to build a product and see if it can gain traction before we create larger quantities.

Unfortunately, you can hit the limits on Etsy pretty quickly too. It’s important to remember that customers on Etsy are really Etsy’s customers and not directly your customers. That makes it harder to create long-term relationships with the customers, reward repeat buyers or provide promotional discounts to existing customers. You’re also subjected to Etsy’s fees, shipping options, and ever-changing search algorithms that could drive a ton of traffic to your shop one day and none the next. You don’t control any of that.

In order to grow, we need to sell through other channels and marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart.com but the best place for us would be to sell directly through our own website where we can maintain closer relationships with our customers and provide more options like customizations and shipping providers.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When we experienced our first holiday season, it was rough. We were receiving orders far faster than we could build our products and it required getting up at 5am and working until 11pm every single day. It was physically exhausting work but we really enjoyed it because we were passionate and genuinely excited for our customers. After surviving the holidays, we experienced the quiet lull of post-holiday sales where everything feels like it comes to a complete stop. It would take a couple holiday seasons for us to realize this is normal and to not panic through the ups and downs of the sales cycle. It’s so easy to be over-confident during good times and then unsure of everything during tough times. The key is to take the long view, stay calm, and just keep going.

Contact Info:

• Website: lumagoods.com
• Instagram: @lumagoods