We recently connected with Eddy Prawiro and have shared our conversation below.

Eddy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Looking back, what’s an important lesson you learned at a prior job

I worked as a dental office space planner at the biggest dental office supplies distributor in the country. At this job, I developed creativity in problem-solving and learned communication skill that are proved to be very helpful in my personal development as a business owner.

When designing a dental office, often times our clients asked us to provide several design options. When I was not able to, my supervisor showed me the way that would eventually opened my mind that there’s always a different way to solve a problem. So, every time I encounter a problem, my mind would automatically explore different ways to solve the problem, and then weigh each option before I made my decision to choose what I believe to be the best one.

At this job, I also communicated with the clients through the company’s sales reps assigned in the area. As an introvert, communication is one of my biggest weaknesses and years of communication with sales reps helped me tremendously. My boss on my 2nd job even said that “I am very diplomatic” in communicating, a skill I use daily with my customers, employees, suppliers and other vendors to build long-term relationship.

Eddy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My success story could happen to literally anyone in US. US has so many opportunities for people who’re willing to work hard no matter what background and skills they have. As I worked paycheck to paycheck, I quickly realized that I wouldn’t be able save enough money for my future from that job alone.

I came from an entrepreneurial family. As I have a strong interest in video games, I thought I would try to earn income supplement by finding good deals in video games from retail stores and selling them online through ebay. It started from minimum amount of capital, by selling a few games and kept reinvesting the earning to buy more inventory.

There comes a time where I had to decide whether I kept working full time for a company while doing my ebay side business or focusing on growing my business. It was a big decision to make and I remembered my father once said that if I had to choose between working for others for more money or working for myself for less, I should choose working for myself as the potential to grow is many times over. He was right.

Our business took off when we started selling anime merchandises. We believe in giving the best prices to our customers. These 3 areas are our focus in growing our business: low price, fast shipping handling, and customer service. Some of our competitors would spend money on advertising and social media influencers while keeping their prices high, but we believe in word-of-mouth advertising model while keeping our prices low including free shipping. We also give back to our customers in the amount of reward points. Most of our customers are loyal customers who have been buying from us for years. We are proud of serving anime communities with newest products at lowest prices in US online retail landscape.

As we grew bigger, more resellers were asking us if we could sell our products at wholesale prices so they could resell them domestically or in their home countries. We recently organized our inventory list to accommodate this request to give small business owners an outlet to buy our products at wholesale prices. We priced them at minimum profit margin because it’s really not our main income source. It’s really about helping other small businesses who couldn’t buy directly from our suppliers for any reasons and reducing our risks from overstock.

I want to use this opportunity to advise people to spend a little bit more time to shop from mom-and-pop small businesses like us whenever possible. I know very well the appeal of shopping at big retail chains such as convenience, big selection and lower prices, but you’ll be surprised on what you could find at these small businesses. They could offer you better prices at lower profit margin or some unique items that you wouldn’t be able to find in a big store. Besides, most of these small businesses treat their workers better than some big businesses. Our company provides very flexible schedules to our workers. We treat our customers with respect and courtesy by providing real answers and solutions instead of scripted answers used by a lot of big companies.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

In 2015, amazon suspended our selling account. As our business depends on amazon sales heavily (~70%), we’re very vulnerable. We had to layoff all of our employees but 1 person. We tried to appeal amazon’s suspension ourselves, but we failed. We googled to see if other sellers shared similar situations and it turned out that many amazon sellers were also getting suspended.

We hired a small business who specializes in getting amazon account reinstated. From what our advisor told us, it turned out that the reason may have been a flaw in changes in amazon’s metric algorithm that would trigger amazon bots to suspend those accounts including ours. She told us that she had gotten a lot of calls from many business owners selling at amazon regarding suspension during that time.

She finally able to reinstate our amazon account. Had we not been able to reinstate our account, it would be the end of our small business. We lost about $70,000 in the span of 3 months during that suspension period.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We are selling our new products at amazon, ebay, walmart, and our own retail website. We are also selling our damaged and returned products at offerup.com

When I started my side hustle at minimum capital cost, it would make sense to use marketplaces like amazon or ebay. However, if I were to give advise, I would advise anyone to start their own businesses from small/scratch by opening their own sites. I would advise to use marketplaces like amazon or ebay to supplement income only and not to depend on those sites to grow their businesses.

Marketplaces Pro: Ease of use, Faster sales, No or little marketing and web development cost, Provide options to outsource shipping and customer service.

Marketplaces Cons: No control over policies, customer base, and fees. Higher returns, Conflict of interest due to amazon being platform and competitor at the same time.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.eknightmedia.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/eknightmedia/
• Twitter: @eknightm
• Other: www.eknightanime.com

Image Credits
Pictures provided by my brother in law.