We were lucky to catch up with Lexly Cruz & Maddie Dilg recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Lexly Cruz & Maddie Dilg thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
Throughout college, although both of us were pursuing science degrees, we always found solace in music- specifically k-pop music. We both managed to persevere through the difficulties of graduating in the midst of a global pandemic by immersing ourselves in the k-pop community. We attended concerts, bought albums, and started collecting photocards. While we may have lost touch after high school, this common interest brought us back together. In the beginning of 2022, we ended up at the same concert at The Forum in LA, and became even closer amongst the crowd of k-pop fans from all over the world. Only a few months later we envisioned what it would be like to have that same kind of space for the k-pop community in our own city, Portland, OR. We wanted to create an environment where k-pop fans could comfortably come together and share their love for k-pop. As fans ourselves, we know how expensive k-pop merchandise can be, especially with international shipping. So what better way to bring everyone together than to provide a welcoming experience for k-pop fans to express themselves while at the same time having their favorite albums available for an affordable price? While the k-pop community in Portland was already amazing, we knew it could become something more if only there was a “Central” gathering force. We want to be that “Central” force. Our name K-Music Central embodies that vision, and we can’t wait to see what this community can become together. We understand the difficulties of expressing yourself through a music genre that isn’t always seen as “mainstream”, so we’re excited that our events, and eventually our store, can allow people to connect with others who share the same interests.
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?
We have been avid listeners of k-pop music for many years now. From the beginning, we noticed that there was never a central place for people to gather together and share this love of k-pop. So we decided to take matters into our own hands and create this “Central” together. After lon9 nights of planning and creating, K-Music Central was born. We are so very proud and excited to provide an opportunity for the community to come together. K-Music Central provides k-pop merchandise such as albums, DVDs, photobooks, magazines, and opportunities for fansign events. We are one of the first, if not the first, businesses in Portland, OR that provides an easy-to-use online shopping experience for k-pop items. We are the first k-pop business in the area to make sure our album sales count for important charts such as Hanteo and Circle. We know how important these charts can be for k-pop fans who want to express their support for their favorite artists in this way. Our first pop-up event provided the first in-person k-pop-only album shopping experience for people in the Portland Metro Area. And the first to provide a large variety of albums (now more than 80 different artists!) We often host pop-up events as a way to continue offering this experience until the day we establish our store. Our mission is to provide an environment for k-pop fans to connect and share their love for their favorite music without feeling uncomfortable in a society that hasn’t fully accepted k-pop as a mainstream genre. Personally, we absolutely love meeting k-pop fans who come from all over the Pacific Northwest and beyond to attend our events. We hope to continue these events as more and more k-pop enthusiasts are born!
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
In July 2022, an opportunity for a potential partnership popped up. Only a month after our opening day, we were still attempting to grow our social media presence. We came upon a tweet offering an opportunity for small k-pop businesses to partner with a well-established international k-pop shop. As part of this initiative, this shop created an exclusive album to market and sell in order to bring support to small businesses. We took a chance, reached out, and secured the partnership. Once the organizers announced the event, within a few hours, we gained close to 100 followers. We did our part by creating marketing materials for all our social platforms (mainly Instagram and Twitter) to use this opportunity to reach a larger country-wide audience. We took a risk by purchasing a large amount of these exclusive albums, with the hope that people in our area would come through and purchase from a brand-new small k-pop business. We managed to connect with many k-pop fans who enthusiastically supported us as the first k-pop store in their city. The support was overwhelming, and the risk we took in making this big purchase paid off faster than we ever could have imagined. We even had to place an additional order to address the online demand. Even then, the in-person turnout was overwhelming. We learned a lot from this experience: mainly that the k-pop community in person was much larger than we expected. Through this event, we gained a lot of local followers, and people who come to every event. We are so grateful for these regulars and the support they’ve shown since the beginning. This was such a great marketing and sales experience, and we hope to form partnerships like this with companies all over the world in order to make k-pop more accessible in the Pacific Northwest.
How did you build your audience on social media?
We selected the most popular social media platforms amongst the k-pop community as the first step in building our social media presence. We created Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok accounts and started a countdown to the opening day of our online store. These early posts allowed us to build our personal style through images and personalized captions with strategic hashtags. We focused on consistency with emojis and text style while capturing the k-pop aesthetic in our images. Using the style we created, our initial goal was to connect with the k-pop community by sharing not only our diverse album catalog but also the behind-the-scenes images and stories of our creative journey. Our #1 advice is to be consistent and to take advantage of relevant trending hashtags to spread your message to a wider audience. Consistency is important for communicating with followers, bringing in new customers, and reminding the community that you exist. These habits have greatly improved our presence online and allowed us to gain new support.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.kmusiccentral.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/kmusiccentral/
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/k-music-central-llc/about/
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/kmusiccentral
- Other: www.tiktok.com/@kmusiccentral
Image Credits
Credits to K-Music Central (1-7) and @SameLoveTwice (Main image with logo)