Welcome!
Welcome to this e-commerce business success story! In this profile, we interviewed Ulas Uygun, the owner of WOO Branding – an innovative D2C logo and digital asset company. Our hope is that you find this interview to be enlightening and inspiring as you seek to start and grow your very own online brand!
Ulas Uygun Interview
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?
Long story short is that I was not happy at my 9-5 and wanted to try my hand at something more creative. So I learned graphic design by taking online courses while maintaining my 9-5. I waited until the revenue I generated through my graphic design business, WOO Branding, justified my leave from my 9-5. Though financials were in place after 2-3 years, it was still a leap of faith in many regards.
Fast forward 5 years, I now have regular clients for which WOO Branding creates bespoke visuals. We have recently launched a digital marketplace that offers designer logos for sale, illustrations and other creative material available for instant download.
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?
Number one would be to clearly define a target market. You should now exactly who your product appeals to even before launch. It goes without saying that once sales start pouring in, you’ll have a chance to validate that target market. This means that the type of people that are actually interested in your product might differ from who you thought they might have been. That’s ok as long as you continue to observe your target market and align product with their needs, values and priorities.
Number two would be to make sure you gather data and learn to navigate analytics for any type of decision making. Keen on introducing new products? Introduce one and observe the numbers. Thinking of investing in a novel marketing channel, spare a limited budget and monitor the numbers.
Number three would be to have a number of people that is competent and specialised with great communication skills. If you’re a one-man business chances are you’ll have to start hiring people / working with freelancers once sales start to pick up. That’s when you should make important decisions on who to work with. Try to pick people who have excellent communication skills and have an expertise in a specific field. For a young business that still needs to establish working principles, specialty matters much more than it does for an already-established business.
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?
The biggest challenge was to delegate. I consider myself a more than competent graphic designer. I can also navigate numbers much more easily due to my education and background. But I am not always great at handling conflict and I’ve lost clients because of a few communication slips in the past. The solution to this type of challenges would be to doubling down on one’s strong suits and delegating the rest of the responsibilities to those who excel at them.
We’ve just rolled out logos for sale (www.woobranding.com), easily downloadable from our online store. We’ve received a great reaction from our audience. The content of WOO Branding’s online store will expand from here to designer items such as illustrations, icons and other design items such as brushes, textures etc.
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?
We’ve just rolled out logos for sale, instantly downloadable from our online store. We’ve received a great reaction from our audience. The content of WOO Branding’s online store will expand from here to designer items such as illustrations, icons and other design items such as brushes, textures etc.
Sounds exciting! Any final words of advice for our readers?
A final advice would be to focus on the solution. For somebody who has just stepped out of their comfort zone, almost anything can seem like an unbeatable challenge and that’s completely normal. Simply continue to focus on the solution and you’ll see that it’ll get easier with time. Just remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
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?
You can follow WOO Branding on Instagram, LinkedIn or Pinterest
You can follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn.
