MummyBabiesJoy – Jacqueline Wang

Story By Jacqueline Wang – MummyBabiesJoy

When I have given birth to Rachel, my elder child, I knew the day will come when I will need to quit my job to look after her. Somehow the idea of quitting my job and be a stay at home mum were not seriously considered till Rachel had loss interest in her study and failed all her subjects in K2. It’s really wakeup call and I decided to take action.

With only my husband working, there will be a strain on our finances to pay for all the bills, insurances and tuition classes for my children. For this reason, I was constantly thinking what I should do to keep bring in some income even if I am not working. I know that I will need to either find a home base job or part time job which nowadays is not easy to find one which suits my timing. Finally, I decided to have my own business which I have been dreaming about for many years, instead of working for others. Due to lack of finance, experience and time issue, I choose to set up an online business selling babies and children clothes.

The idea and reason of selling babies and children clothes online are – it can be 24 hrs services yet I do not need to work 24 hrs; plus its cheap as a blog does not require any rental fees, man power and utility fees. At the beginning, I do lot of studies and research. Looking at how other people set up their online shops, their websites, how they sell their items and what are their team and conditions.

Besides getting ideas on how others do their business online, looking for suppliers also is another important thing I need to take note. As getting local suppliers demand higher cost, I look for other supply from oversea online. Finding a reliable supplier online is not easy, I do research on different website which provide information on all countries supplier and read their reviews, go into their website and see the goods they supply; read the customers feedback if any. By doing this, I am able to short listed a few suppliers and start contacting them with some enquiries about their products.

Of course, I did face some problems like some of the suppliers did not want to entertain small scale business like mine; most of the orders must at least 1,000 quantities per design which I cannot afford. However, I did not give up but to keep sending emails to others and finally got one supplier willing to accept my order in 500 qty for 5 designs. Later, I managed to get a few more suppliers who are dealing with small scale businesses with a very good deal.

On the other hand, I also start to look out for online hosting company and thinking of what company name will be suitable for my online shop. As I am first timer and have tight budget, I decided to use blog to start my online business. Next, I started to goggles search those names which I decided to name my blog shop, to check if they have been used. After a few round of searching and renaming, my blog shop name finally settled as mummybabiesjoy (http://mummybabiesjoy.blogspot.com).

Once I have my blog shop name and register a blog in blogger, I start writing some articles regard my own experience in babies and children information. I tried to input the information once a week or twice to keep the blog easy search by goggles. I also added some feature to help my blog get search in the goggles and have reports on the traffic for my blog shop. To make my blog shop look professional, I designed my own logo with some help from my husband who is a graphics designer. Also, I tried to make the blog as clean and simple as possible for easy browsing. Once I have done all these, I am ready to start selling my clothes online.

The first time when I started to put up my babies rompers to sell, the response were poor. So I started to try all various ways to promote my blog shop – advertise on free website; distributing flyers which I did myself; email to friends and ask them to help circulates using e-news letter (using simple html); join online forum to get more exposure, etc. I even go to flea market to sell my clothes at the same time promote my online blog shop to the customers by giving them my name card (design by me and my husband) with my blog URL address on it. As such, my online business slowly has some response and the business started to show some results.

Till now, I am still learning and finding ways to get my online business grow. Feel free to visit my blog and you are most welcome to share any suggestions or ideas with me.

Jacqueline Wang
Visit us : MummyBabiesJoy