Welcome!
In this e-commerce business profile, we had the pleasure of interviewing Mark from Bundl clothing – a truly unique clothing startup selling vintage apparel. Read to learn all about their business, and get inspired!
Interview with Bundl Clothing
Thank you for joining us for this e-commerce business success story! We’d like to start by getting an understanding of your backstory. How did you come to own your business?
The idea came about by accident, I was in need of some new clothes and headed to Ebay to find what I could for a bargain, being a quite picky about getting the best deal I could. I did a bit of negotiating, made offers and generally tried my luck as best as possible, and managed to purchase a few items on the cheap. When I received these, unfortunately some of them didn’t fit, so decided to resell them on ebay. I was slightly surprised when I sold them for considerably more than the purchase price, even after the fees and shipping costs there was still significant profit being made. So I started purchasing lots of different items on ebay, always trying to get the lowest price I could, making offers and last minute bids.
Fast forward about 18 months and I had quite my full time job to pursue this full time. A few month later than that around December 2022 I moved into a 3000 sqft warehouse and hired the first employee. We now have myself and two other full time employees working on this, and have built up an inventory of more than 7000 items to date, we still sell on Ebay and also Depop, but now also sell through our own vintage and used clothing website, where we can offer better service, including free returns and lower prices.
Terrific! Now, this article is about profiling successful e-commerce businesses. So – can you share your top 3 keys to running a successful online brand?
Know your numbers! If you’re selling physical products, then you need to know what your best products are. We sell a huge range of products from different brands and different categories. But we have a few brands and categories that we know sell fast and sell with excellent margin. We keep the full assortment so customers have variety, but always make sure to restock the hero products as much as possible.
Use technology to your advantage. Look at your workflows and see what you can do to improve its efficiency. For us it what the process of processing used items of clothing and collecting the information and images. If we relied on the software provided by Shopify, Ebay, and Depop we would have to fill in the information 3 times for every item. We have used Appsheet, a Google product, to create a fully customized app for collecting product information and images all from a mobile phone, this information is then sent to separate spreadsheets which are downloaded as CSV documents and uploaded to each site at the end of the day. Without this efficiency we wouldn’t have been able to grow in scale, and productivity would be significantly lower.
Similar to my first point, sell high quality products. We have learnt over time what is a good seller, and we rely on the power of the brand labels that we sell. Thats why we’ve got a huge range of Ralph Lauren Items & Levi’s Jeans. Because they’re super strong brands that are hugely dominant. We are able to “piggy back” on their brand power and attract customers with prices that are upto 95% below retail.
Excellent. Now, I’m sure it hasn’t always been that easy. Can you tell a story about one challenge, setback, or mistake that you’ve had to overcome on the road to success? How can others learn from your mistakes?
Be prepared for unexpected expenses or costs of business that you don’t foresee. Make a solid plan of what you think launching your business will cost, then budget for it to increase by 50% atleast. The costs associated with being a functioning company, particularly once you operate from a commercial space are astounding. Every B2B service costs significantly more than it would if it was B2C, and the government is always going to try and get more tax out of you somehow. But this goes back to keeping an eye on your numbers, and knowing what you can afford. But don’t be afraid to scale if you can see the logic in the numbers.
Thanks for that. Now – we want to know what’s next! What new initiatives are you rolling out at your business and what results are you hoping to see?
Our next stage is increased marketing, SEO, paid advertising, and any other methods of increasing traffic to our website. Our website sales currently account for only approximately 15% of our turnover, with the remainder coming from Ebay and Depop. Moving those sales to our website would save us thousands in fees every month.
Sounds exciting! Any final words of advice for our readers?
I think I’ve said everything I needed to, just make sure you’re enjoying what you’re doing!
Brilliant! We want to thank you for participating in today’s interview. Hopefully our readers agree that there is a lot to be learned from your brand’s story. What links can our readers use to follow along with your journey?
No Problem, you can keep updated with us on:
TikTok, and of course at https://bundlclothing.co.uk
