We were lucky to catch up with Ivory Lawrence recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Ivory, thanks for joining us today. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.
How did you get your first client? After months of working on making my products and perfecting my craft of making candles and wax melts, I still was not ready!!! I had invested a lot of money at this point and felt defeated. I knew in that moment that I needed to take some kind of action NOW! I decided to highlight and focus on what products I knew how to make, wax melts. I committed to a launch date and set to prepare for that date. I downloaded apps to make flyer ads of what I was selling and promote it. I had to overcome my fear of rejection and failure. I sent out text messages, emails, social media post to all my family and friends. When I launched, I had sales and support from everyone and it felt amazing! This gave me the motivation, encouragement I needed to keep going.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am the owner and creator of Ivory Luxe Candle Co products. I’m from Dallas, TX and have been a artsy creator all my life, but found my niche in candles and home products last year! It’s been a crazy ride and journey revealing my true purpose and passion.
My mission and goal with Ivory Luxe products and brand is to help people especially women foster an environment that changes and shifts their atmosphere. I believe our home is our sanctuary and deserves to be peaceful, and relaxing. Nothing does that better than crackling wood burning candles, long lasting aromatic room sprays, relaxing bath and body products that all remind us to slow down, inhale all the good around us in our environment and release those things that don’t serve our highest self.
It is my pleasure to serve each and every one of my customers with the best products, customer service and experience. It’s all about the experience for me!
Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?
When I started my business, I immediately knew it was important to me to have my own website. I respect all platforms that help small business succeed by providing a ready-made and established audience and traffic flow to shop their business easily.
For me having my own website has helped me establish my own brand presence, the downside to this is that I am solely responsible for driving traffic to my website to maintain sales. This requires me to learn more about business marketing, website SEO, conversation rates and so on. Although learning how to keep my website traffic active is a challenge, I enjoy using the Shopify platform and would highly recommend it to any business starting out. The apps and built-in analytics that is available as well as the platform education and support is awesome to have as a business owner.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
Being a small business it’s hard to initially grow your clientele. Selling to family and friends at first helps but has a limited reach and growth beyond the initial supportive sale. I found that networking with other small businesses, word of mouth referrals, local pop up shops and providing samples has helped expose new people to my brand an eventually win them as a customer. Social media and interacting with my audience on different platforms has also helped me grow, build trust and a brand story though visual images. Social media has also encouraged and given the opportunity for loyal customers to share their experience with our products to their network of friends and family. I am extremely grateful for social media and its advantages of reaching more people all over the world.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ivoryluxecandleco.com
- Instagram: @Ivoryluxecandleco
- Facebook: Ivoryluxecandleco
Image Credits
D Lacy Photos