Part 2 of L.Eyes Eyewear

How L.Eyes started part 2.....

So now that we have found our product and that we have made a website we still didn't really make much sales. We did a few pop up stalls in Brisbane and Gold Coast to see if we could sell some glasses. We only sold 1 pair, and it really got us down. We could've let it affect us or we needed to pivot and try again. We chose to keep trying!

So we kept hustling, and we joined every Kiwi page there was on fb, Kiwis in Brisbane, Kiwis in Melbourne, Kiwis in Sydney etc. We started posting our story and product and we started getting some interest. It was really cool watching other New Zealanders supporting our business. We built this little community that really loved our products. Our goal was to lets try make $200 a week. We knew $200 was a realistic goal for us. We started to then see ourselves reaching our goals. We also didn't want to just spend the money, we really wanted to reinvest the money back into the business. 

So with the sudden surge of customers visiting our website we actually thought we were on a roll. One thing i noticed was inconsistency of our sales. I would watch gurus talk about making $500 a day or $1000 a day and wondered how can we reach that point of sales? We kept listening to Mike Dillard and found the YKTR podcast as well. We also fell in love with Gary V! I really loved Isaac Johns content and determination. He had really good tips on how to build a business which i implemented in our business.

One thing that i watched that really changed my perspective was The Defiant ones on Netflix. It is the story of NWA, DR Dre and how eventually Dre Beats was created. The thing that stuck out to me was the way they used famous people to market the product. Little did i know that it was called Influencer marketing. So i looked up a lot about influencer marketing and wondered how i could implement it to help build our brand. 

We were inspired by a lot of things like music, art, faith, fashion and motivating content. We are passionate about self development and working towards goals. We wondered how we could create such a demand for a product that it created a thirst in people to own a pair. We wondered what is something that really moves people? for me it was music, and this was the start of looking how i could use music as a way to show case our sunglasses. New Zealand music inspired me especially NZ reggae. So we started to reach out to artists like Tomorrow People, House of Shem, and Paua. We then implemented culture, and stories into the product to create this unique product. A persons heritage and upbringing was another motivating factor in peoples lives. 

We were just stoked to be able to approach bands and groups we looked up to. One thing that we loved is how humble NZ artists were. They were just happy and willing to support a NZ owned business. We reached out towards many artists to see what they thought of our sunglasses. We did ask favours from some to post up content but 95% of the artists freely did it anyway to help us. Our strategy has changed slightly now since we have learned a lot about marketing. 

We used our facebook page and Instagram to build our little community. I remember starting and thinking how do we get 1000 followers? it took us over 12 months to get to 500 followers. We shared content, and kept trying new things. There was one thing we were very weak in and that is that we didn't like to be in front of the camera! lol. We actually hate it so we knew we were not going to build our page quickly and watch our content go viral!. lol We are a very private introverted husband and very social but camera shy wife! lol. 

So far we had our foundation built with our website, product, social channels, and we slowly got our strategy together with building our brand through influencer marketing. Now we were able to start scaling our business to $500 a week! At this stage we had been working with some amazing influencers and many of them were our idols growing up. King Kapisi, Che fu, Katchafire, Piri Weepu, and more. What a buzz this whole process was creating within us. 

Part 3 to come soon!