TEDx Sydney - 22 May

On Saturday Jodie and I went along to TEDx Brisbane and wow, it was an amazing event! TED stands for 'Technology, Entertainment and Design' and the idea of TED is for a bunch of really interesting people to share what their working on in short lectures. I've always enjoyed watching the videos of these lectures from the TED website.

TEDx is an independently organised TED event, and Brisbane TEDx was organised by Carl Lindgren and Paul Fairweather who did an amazing job. All the presentations were inspiring and some particularly so. The full line up of speakers from the day is listed on the TEDx Brisbane website here. My favourite presentation for the day was the photojournalist Nigel Brennan who spoke about being held hostage in Somalia for 15 months. I also enjoyed Dr. Joel Gilmore's presentation on the pros and cons of nuclear power, and Deborah Fleming talking about the ABC TV show Australian Story which she started.

In addition to the great speakers there were plenty of breaks and opportunities to meet the other attendees and I got to meet some really interesting people who I plan to stay in touch with. I've been going along to a lot of entrepreneurial type events and those have been great, but the thing I loved about TEDx is that the topics covered are so broad so I was exposed to lots of ideas and people that I might not come across normally.

TEDx Sydney is scheduled for 22 May and I'm very keen to go along to it now too. You need to apply to attend so visit their website to sign up to their newsletter and you'll be notified when applications are open. TEDx Brisbane had over 1000 people apply for what was initially only 260 places. The videos from TEDx Brisbane should be online soon.

Brilliant Use of Twitter - BestBuy Twelpforce

My marketing friend Matt Newell was telling me about BestBuy and their 'Twelpforce' and it's a brilliant use of Twitter!

BestBuy employees will answer any tech related questions sent to the @twelpforce Twitter account. And even better for BestBuy, their employees are happy to answer these questions in their own time! I guess this taps into the human desire to be seen as knowledgeable and an expert, because BestBuy employees are going home, logging into Twitter and answering customer questions.

BestBuy have made some pretty good ads promoting the service too:

Shoes of Prey - Wholesale

Our custom shoe business is growing nicely so we thought we'd try out hand at offering a wholesale service to fashion retailers.

Retailers can design shoes for their stores using our online shoe designer, then if they order a quantity of each style and colour, and are happy to wait 2-3 months for delivery we can offer them a wholesale price which we believe is competitive with what similar shoe brands in the market are offering. The retailer gets the added benefit of being able to design shoes that complement the other products they stock in their store.

Our cost to manufacture multiple pairs of an identical shoe is less than the cost to make one pair of custom shoes. And ocean freight costs for a large quantity of shoes are less than 1/10th what we pay to post a single pairs of shoes directly to customers, hence being able to offer a good wholesale price.

We're not sure how this business will compare with our custom shoe business, but our theory is that our custom shoe offering is helping us build a good brand, which we can leverage to offer wholesale, ready made shoes. And while we make much less selling a wholesale shoe, in theory the volumes should be much higher.

We'd love to hear your thoughts, and if you know any retailers who might be interested please let us know as we'll be spending the next month or two speaking to as many retailers as we can.

Distribution partnerships - The Swissôtel, Sydney

We've been working with the Swissôtel in Sydney for the last month and together we've put a package together that includes 2 Shoes of Prey gift certificates, a hotel room and high tea for two.

It's very exciting to be working with a brand like the Swissôtel as they're a great fit with our brand. And we're hoping women love the concept of a beautiful hotel, high tea and custom shoes. There should be some great PR and sales opportunities for both of us that come out of the partnership, and we're hoping to work the hotel to run some events in the future so we'll be working on these opportunities more over the coming months.

We're starting to put our minds towards partnerships that help us build awareness of our brand, and enable us to distribute our shoes. Lots of great businesses have used distribution partnerships to get themselves started. Eg. PayPal with eBay and Google powering Yahoo's search engine in their early years.

If you're running a business are you looking at distribution partnerships? Any more famous examples you know of where businesses leveraged distribution partnerships successfully to get themselves started?

Improving our conversion rate

Based on our offline retail experience to date, when customers physically get to see and touch our shoes they are 10 times more likely to make a purchase than a customer who only visits our website.

From our discussions with these customers part of the reason is that they get a much better understanding of the quality of the shoes when they see them in person. And at our price point that's important.

When I last visited our workshops I took some photos of the shoes being made and we've put this together to tell the story of how the shoes are made.

At the moment the link to this page is hidden away in our FAQs so I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this. Do the photos and the story assist in getting the quality message across?

Motivation (Part 2)

As we've mentioned previously, starting a business is a roller coaster ride, the lows are low and the highs are high.

The Chinese New Year issues we've had are certainly a dip in the ride and can make it that bit harder to stay extremely motivated, but then experiences like we've had with Jill and Brett and their wedding help to put us back up at the peak of the ride.

We first met Jill at Sydney Fashion Weekend and we had her and some of her bridesmaids around to Jodie and my place to try on our shoes and select the right materials and colours for their shoes from our leather books. Jill ordered her wedding shoes from us in shiny gold soft leather, and each of her 3 bridesmaids, Anastasia, Lisa and Claire came up with their own designs and ordered them in matching silver soft leather. Straight after the wedding they replied to say how happy their were with their shoes and sent us some of the wedding photos. And last week Jill sent us a CD with high resolution photos and has said we're welcome to use them in our marketing materials to help promote our business, and she's planning to order more shoes from us!

Receiving such great feedback and knowing that we helped Jill and Brett enjoy their wedding that little bit more is hugely rewarding. Following are some of the wedding photos. Thanks Jill, Brett, Anastasia, Lisa and Claire!













Credits: Photography by Justin Malinowski. And on a side note, like Jodie and I, Jill and Brett are a husband and wife team running their own business, the creative agency Pretty Pollution

The Springwise and TechCrunch Effect

Last week was an exciting one for Shoes of Prey. In addition to moving into our new offices we had the good fortune to be written up by two of our favourite websites in the same week, Springwise and TechCrunch.

As entrepreneurs in the tech space know, these are two good sites to get written up on and I always wondered what their effect would be on a website's traffic. If you've ever wondered this too we thought we'd share our data with you.

The chart below shows our visits over the past month. It shows up a little small in this post but we were traveling fairly consistently between 1,000 and 2,000 daily visits until Tuesday of last week when the Springwise article was posted. Tuesday was a new record day at 3,971 visits, Wednesday beat that with 10,009 visits and Thursday is our new record day with 17,092 visits. The TechCrunch article was posted on Saturday and that helped keep our visits high over the weekend.



So what were our top referring sites and how much traffic did Springwise and TechCrunch send to us? Below are our top 10 referral sites for the month ending February 15. The first thing you'll notice is that after direct traffic, the top referring site is web.rambler.ru, a Russian news site. They wrote about us shortly after the Springwise article went up, so we assume that's how they came across us as Springwise is widely read by journalists. The Russian traffic didn't convert so well, but there were still plenty of new referring sites in Australia and the US that popped up following the Springwise article.



Another thing you'll note is that the traffic from Springwise and TechCrunch isn't actually that high. Springwise have a huge email subscription list and most tech geeks who read TechCrunch do so via an RSS reader (Mike and I included), so both these sites actually sent us a lot more traffic than Google Analytics shows.

Twitter also reached our top 10 referring sites for the first time thanks to TechCrunch requiring uses to retweet their post to enter the competition to win the gift voucher. That got a lot of people talking about us on Twitter which was great.

Another interesting point to note, the number of referring sites in Google Analytics jumped from 560 in the month to Feb 8 to 890 in the month to today. While a lot of those are email servers, there's still a good number of new sites that have linked to us which should be a nice boost on the SEO front.

So if you have a startup all this begs the question, how do you get on Springwise and TechCrunch? Both site's readers are interested in innovative businesses, so you'll either want to have a product that is new and innovative, or be able to pitch it to those guys in that way. A good effort I saw recently was how Good Crush did a play on the recent Parisian Love Google Superbowl Commercial and got themselves written up on TechCrunch for their efforts. Our earlier post about our 5 lessons from Darwin Dating also shares some thoughts on this. Even with all that though it isn't easy as both sites have lots of people pitching to them. We first pitched to them when we launched 4 months ago and only just got written up.