Welcome!
Welcome to this e-commerce business profile. In today’s post, we had the pleasure of interviewing Maleki Burke, the owner of Snootiful Hound, a brand that serves sighthound owners with their innovative and niche-specific products. Check it out and be inspired as you strive to start or grow your own brand!
Interview with Maleki Burke
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?
It started with rescuing my dog, Blondie. She’s a lurcher (saluki mix) which brought about some unique and unexpected challenges. Namely, she used to escape any harness I put her in. After some research, I found out this was quite common with sighthound breeds as traditional harnesses aren’t designed for their body shape, so I set out to design my own sighthound harness. I now sell this, along with a few other products designed for sighthounds, on my shopify store.
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?
You have to know your customer. Mainly the problems they are facing so you can solve them, but also what they respond to so you can communicate your brand values effectively with them.
Put in the time and effort to build a relationship with your customers so that they will come back and shop with you again and share your brand with others. I do this with hand written notes and personalised post purchase email flows.
Clearly highlight the benefits of your product on your product pages, not just the features. Don’t miss out any important information, but keep it concise. Along with high quality product images, this is the basics for a decent conversion rate.
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?
I had a business before this one selling discount goods. After years of grafting, I realised that the margins were just too small to make it work. When pricing your products, don’t just compete on price – this is a race to the bottom. Make sure you allow enough margin for a marketing budget, storage, fulfillment, all of your other costs of doing business. Start your email list early and start thinking about SEO as these have long term payoffs which will greatly reduce your marketing costs as time goes on.
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?
After a successful launch, we quickly added new colours to our already successful products. The next step is to implement our customer feedback to make our hero product, our harness, even better, and to add new product ranges to support our main offering. This should increase our average order value and retention rate – we already have customers asking us for other products so they want to buy again, we just have to make it available!
Sounds exciting! Any final words of advice for our readers?
Niche down! It creates a good opportunity to serve an underserved market, and if it’s something you really care about, that will show to your customers. They’ll appreciate that and that’s how you build brand loyalty, and you’ll be on your way to a sustainable and profitable business.
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?
Here’s a link to our hero product if they want to check it out.
Here’s a link to our website.
Thank you all for joining us for this e-commerce business profile!
