Blog 2: Mega Project
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” ―Nelson Mandela
It is very well said that if you want to achieve something, you can do it by not giving up, with consistency, dedication, and passion. As you all know that during our fellowship at Amal Academy, we were assigned a Megaproject that pushed us all out of our comfort zones and forced us to work and put our efforts towards something impactful or an entrepreneurial idea . So we had chosen to go for a business startup.
Our vision is to work on clothing and bring more traditional designs to the market which are economical. Because a large segment of urban Pakistani women spend considerably on their clothing but still fail to find good cloth quality by renowned brands, our business intends to bridge this gap between providing traditional prints with the best quality. Our target market is urban women aged between 16 and 50 who prefer quality traditional clothing prints.
We plan to impact the market by selling our products at comparatively lower prices. That too, in the comfort of one’s home. People can order what they want, and we will be sharing pictures of products for authenticity. This is a small business, but the target market is huge as everyone is shifting to an online buying system in this Covid-19 era.
Our target market is the group of people who could benefit from our product or service. The target audience is 10% men and 90% women, further classified into 60% teenage girls aged between 18–25 and 30% homemakers or women aged between 25–40. The target market is women aged 18 to 40.
We worked hard to achieve our goals in the last two months, and we are on our way. We aimed of achieving 10000 followers on an Instagram page, but now it doesn’t seem easy like two months is a very short period, but we gained so many followers as the current following is around 1379. Hopefully, we will soon achieve our target. We also fulfilled 20 to 30 orders up till now successfully, and all the customers are very satisfied. The strategies which helped us achieve our progress are following,
· We clearly explain who we are, what we do, and most importantly, what services we provide to customers.
· The basic information about our company, such as contact information, address, and social media accounts, is included on the page.
· We do partnerships with other brands like Lakhany, Saya, Khaddi etc.
· A live chat option on our pages available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is the most complete and useful form of assistance. This tool has the potential to boost our social media pages conversion rate by 10% or more.
· We encourage customers to post reviews by providing a modest discount when they purchase if they give feedback.
Every business comes up with challenges, and those challenges can only be overcome through proper strategies. The challenges we faced in our company is all because of less of trust of people in online business because of bad past experiences in this situation to solve this challenge we always make our customer satisfied through answering their queries on online chat another big challenge we faced was related to delivery charges for this we have made our business delivery charges free we don’t charge the customer for delivery.
We overviewed other online stores to solve the problems. We tried to find what is the difference between our store and other online stores. And how to overcome this difference. So, we found that other online stores were copying the brand design. After copy the design, they were prepared local fabrics themselves. That’s why their products are preparing at low prices. But we were not preparing products ourselves; we were buying, so our production cost was high. But now, we are starting to prepare products ourselves so that our product is also available at a lower price.
Our focus is to provide the quality product to our customers; the products we are providing to the customers are:
- Stitched and Unstitched clothes
- Printed
- Embroidered
2. Jewelry
3. Bangles
The fabric quality of the products is excellent, and we usually reduce our margin as much as possible so that customers can easily purchase them. We sell many wholesalers’ products; whenever new stock or volume comes to the wholesaler, he sends us pictures of that new arrival and uploads them on our online accounts.
We are providing to our customers include contact services through Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Customers can place an order through any of the mentioned mediums and can communicate with us. The other service we are providing to our customers is Home delivery through courier service TCS and Leopards. Through this service, customers are receiving their orders at their doorstep without and any trouble. We are getting positive feedback from our customers, and they are satisfied.
We will make it sustainable by keeping it active after the mega project ends and expanding it more. We will try to be as unique as possible to stand out from the crowd. We will go for the customize packaging and add more interesting features to our business.
Last but not the least, through this mega project, our whole group learned a bundle of things, we all got an insight into how the e-commerce and online business operates. We knew that don’t make the mistake of expecting that it was going to be easy. Put a business plan in place — even a simple one-page goal is better than none. Have a clear idea from the start of how you’re going to “monetize” the efforts. We all improved our communication skills, patience and of course, we all came out of our comfort zone. We all are very grateful to Amal to give us this opportunity, and we are thankful.
