We recently connected with Rachel DAlessandro and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Rachel, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear how you think where to draw the line in terms of asking friends and family to support your business – what’s okay and what’s over the line?
Family and friends are the sole reason as to why my business has taken off! I first started Muni Crews back in 2021, when I posted a Muni Lot crewneck I made for myself on my Instagram story. I had a handful of friends and family message me asking if they could buy one, and the rest is history! As far as asking them support me, I feel as it has never been an issue. I have always felt encouraged and supported in so many ways since the very beginning. I mostly owe it to my parents who gifted me my entire Cricut set and desktop computer. Without those things I could not be where I am now! Since Muni Crews has taken off, I have ran into people repping my brand at Browns tailgates. The coolest part of all of this is getting hearing from my friends, about running into strangers who support my business. Hearing how excited they get to tell me about their encounter with my customers is amazing. Lastly, meeting strangers who have turned into friends from ordering from me is one of the best parts about what I do.
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.
My name is Rachel D’Alessandro and I am the creator and owner of Muni Crews! I am 23 years old from North Olmsted, OH. I am currently living on a small island on Lake Erie called Put-in-Bay, South Bass Island. I have lived and worked at PIB in the service industry for the last two summers. This will be first winter here which will check off my first full year of residency on the island by April 2024. I created Muni Crews in 2021, mostly by accident. I got ahold of iron on letters and ironed them on a crewneck for a Browns tailgate. After posting my final product to my Instagram story, numerous people replied saying they wanted one too! So I took matters into my own hands and created my small business. I named it Muni Crews because the “Muni Lot” was where I tailgate for the Browns games, and the clothing I was making was crewnecks. Since then, I have expanded to many other items besides crewnecks. For example, I sell short and long sleeve t-shirts, hoodies, sweatpants, hats and beer koozies! My main niche is by far the Cleveland Football/tailgate apparel, but I have also done a handful of other categories! I have been very successful with St. Patrick’s Day, and Cleveland Baseball/Basketball collections as well.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
My most effective strategy for growing my clientele has hands down been Instagram giveaways. In the post description I share the giveaway rules which will be the following. Follow @municrews, like the post, share the post to your story, and tag a friend in the comments. Each tag = 1 entry. Each story share = 5 entries. By doing all of those things, my audience is expanded drastically. During one of my giveaways, I gained over 200 followers, and had over 1,300 entries in the comments. Three winners are selected each time. Prizes will usually include free items from my website along with coupons for $ off your next purchases. In cases I collaborate with another Cleveland small business owners to win some of their merch! My favorite giveaway I have done was buying Cleveland Guardians tickets, and use them as the winning prize. It felt amazing to give back just a tiny bit of what my supporters have built for me over the last 2 years.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.
Shopify is what I use to power my website municrews.com! In the beginning stages of my small business, I was taking orders through Instagram DM. I was keeping track of those orders through Google Sheets. That soon got too difficult to keep up with. I then moved over to creating Google Forms for customers to fill out and send their orders in that way. I was personally reaching out to anyone who submitted a request to confirm their order and take their payments via Venmo/Apple Pay. One down side to doing that was people taking a while to reply to me, or in a few cases not replying to me at all. That worked up until moving back to PIB for another busy summer season. I was unable to make time to contact each customer every time an order was placed. It became too overwhelming due to amount of my time that was being consumed at my other job. I finally turned over to Shopify, and created municrews.com. This has been a huge help in my organization process and success of over 300 items sold this year. Customers have a quick and easy way to access all of the available items on my site and make their purchases in a secure way. Shopify also makes printing shipping labels a breeze by creating them for me! All I have to do is confirm the weight of the product once packaged, and print the label! Municrews.com is working for majority of my business. Custom order requests can be sent in through a Google Form, located in the bio of @Municrews Instagram page.
Contact Info:
- Website: municrews.com
- Instagram: @Municrews