We have achieved our summer business goal and our e-commerce business is live! Phew, it’s been a steep learning curve and a lot of hours to get to this point. Here’s a window into what the last month entailed for Jacob and I as we got our inaugural business up and running.
How the ‘Serene Seat’ Came to Be
Initially, Jacob and I researched and chose different products. After much investigation, I decided on slushy cups and he decided on a portable wine aerator. We actually launched them both on our website. Well, it didn’t take long to realize we needed to pool our resources and work on a single product together. The efficiencies we believe in, that made us join forces in the first place, were lost with two products. There may come a time when our operation is streamlined enough that we can have multiple products. But right now, doing everything ourselves, the business is still very labor intensive.
Finding products that would sell successfully was probably the single hardest part of the whole launch process, so this felt like a pretty big set-back. However, we regrouped and focused on working together to find a single product.
And so, the ‘Serene Seat’ was born. It uses a little play on our company name, Serene Habits. The Serene Seat is small plush dog bed that buckles into your car seat. Our product research found that this was a niche that wasn’t saturated. And the product appealed to us.
To supply the product, we used an off-shore company that specializes in sourcing products for wholesalers and e-commerce entrepreneurs. At every turn, we found the international industry supporting US consumerism to be alive and well! From a business stand point, this helped us out enormously. As a young human looking to the planets future, it feels more complicated. Maybe this a separate blog post topic waiting in the wings!
The Ad Campaign
In the era of digital marketing, visibility is everything. We learned from our product launch mis-step and decided to focus our advertising on one social media platform until we became more familiar with how to put together and manage an ad campaign. We decided on TikTok for several reasons. Firstly, TikTok is widely used and free to advertise on. Also, their model allows you to reach a targeted audience and any video has the potential to go viral. Therefore, a viral video ad campaign is what we are aiming for! You can check out our TikTok advertising videos at this link: Serene Seat TikTok Ad Campaign.
Next Steps
As of now, we are managing the ad campaign ourselves. We can see the next big step for us is to navigate automating social media advertising. We need to be able to set it up and have it do the work for us in the background. It remains to be seen if this will fit into our (very small) budget. Stay tuned!
Conclusion
This summer I launched my first business! I feel very proud that Jacob and I achieved our goal. Every future endeavor will build on the knowledge and skills we gained from this inaugural venture. One of the biggest takeaways is that every step involved more than I expected. More learning, more research and more time to implement. This in itself was a huge lesson. We stuck with it through the frustrations and challenges and achieved our goal.
It remains to be seen whether we can make the Serene Seat profitable. But at this point in our journey that seems almost secondary to all the practical knowledge and personal growth we’ve gained. And of course the pride of being part of a generation that values the hustle. Successfully launching this business is a win in itself. This summer of entrepreneurship has set the stage for what promises to be a remarkable journey.
Sophomore year starts in less than a week. I’m sure that for a while our focus will be on our academics and extra-curriculars at Pinnacle. When we have an opportunity to give our business more time I’ll post an update. In the meantime, I’ll be focusing on articles covering relevant research and literature, interviews with inspiring industry professionals, and getting Student Launch off the ground. Read more about this exciting new student community resource in my article “Student Launch: a Peer-to-Peer Business Incubator” linked here.