Hey Guys!!
I'm sure this is the headline you've all been waiting to see, and it's finally here!!
So let me break it down for you guys and catch you up on what's been going on with the store.
Obviously as you could tell in my Life Update Blog post that a lot is going on!
So, let me just be real with you and explain that originally I thought that I was going to open up a store front. This quickly changed when I looked at rent prices in the areas I wanted to open a boutique. The rent actually wasn't the worst part, I was still willing to pay the high rates- until I started noticing that at the time, stores were closing due to the increasing volume of homeless people causing problems for small businesses. I talked it over with family & friends and decided to keep the store online.
I was sourcing the original pieces from a whole sale retailer in the U.K. This was costing me a lot of money in shipping & importing fees and I realized quickly that I would not be able to fill a store with the budget I had. Originally I thought that I needed more accessories for the brick and mortar so I sourced some items Downtown in Los Angeles, CA. I found a few quality pieces but the majority of the items that came from there were not exactly what I wanted to sell. After all my trials and tribulations, I finally found a company in San Pedro, CA that I am SO happy with. All of our new clothing pieces have come from this vendor and the quality has exceeded my expectations.
So, needless to say despite all my efforts with pop up sales and farmers makets- I wasn't making enough sales from my business and I really didn't know what to do with the boutique. Between website fees, insurance, licenses and permits, I realized I was in over my head trying to start a business. I had to pay my bills and the best way to do that is to work, so I took jobs Casting in Production whenever I could. But whenever I work, my business suffers unfortunately that's just the nature of it. So the business was put on the back burner, I was feeling discouraged and didn't want to continue paying for all of the things I started when I wasn't seeing any revenue come in.
So really the pandemic couldn't have hit at a better time because it gave me the opportunity to reflect on what I want out of this business and put holds on all of my business and working accounts. I was already starting to doubt all of my plans and questioned whether this was the right business for me or not. But life took it's course as it always does and put me where I needed to be now.
When I first started this, people would ask me who my audience was, I couldn't really pinpoint it - I just assumed women. Probably younger women? But I hardly know any younger women, so how could my fully online business target them with very little marketing knowledge? I had no idea how to read my website analytics. It took a lot of changes and research in the last year to figure out who my audience is. Now I know that my audience is women in my age group 25-35, most likely young mothers, or wives, young women who want to start a family or a business. This is the group I find myself most comfortable talking to because this is what life is all about for me.
I want to empower women like myself who've been through big life changes, to look and feel their best. I know now that retail as a whole is not exactly my expertise. Who knows, this could change over time like all things do with experience. But what I do know is that I have always gravitated to beautiful dresses. That's what I always loved about going to a boutique versus the mall or shopping online, I always loved finding unique dresses and thats the experience I've wanted to give my customers.
I've finally figured out that I want to design a few dresses. I want to produce products that you guys actually love and could see yourselves wearing. I felt like half of the clothes in my store didn't really reflect me and I felt rushed to fill a store with products. Now, I know that I have a supportive husband and a stable environment. Which means I have no reason to rush my goals even if it means putting them on hold when necessary to continue working and providing for my family.
So now that we have moved into our house and I have my own office, I have a space to work with my products (which I am going to post some new photos soon - it's completely different than the original tour I posted on instagram, which you can find in my highlight "house tour"). Now that I've had time to go through products, I've decided that I want to clean out what I have now and start working on our next collection. I am really looking forward to creating my own dresses. I don't know how long this will realistically take or if I will even be able to afford this anytime soon (especially without going back to work) but this is my next goal and that's why I've created this new blog space for you guys to follow along with me throughout this journey and help me design & source everything together.
And the last thing i wanted to address was the need to always keep up with social media and the pressure that consumed me. I feel like we don’t talk about this enough but the pressure that i experienced trying to keep up with my social media accounts became an entire job in itself. As if running a business and being a mother and wife wasn’t enough pressure. So to minimize the pressure i started strategizing how i will be able to maintain my social presence and decided it would be best for me to keep everything on one social media platform. So going forward i will just use my main account @huttonsalvatore for all things related to hutton nicole and my brand. I wish i could just use @huttonnicole but of course the name is somehow taken? I’m not sure if this is too confusing so let me know some of your thoughts on this. Another option would be to find someone to manage my business social media as an internship for experience? What do you guys think of these options? I feel like one feed would be so much more cohesive to keep up with everything I'm posting daily. But let me know your thoughts in the comments!
So anyway, to help me reach my goal I've finally got my products back up on my website - you can shop here now - and I've discounted nearly all of our items to extremely low prices for our inventory clean out sale! Use the shop tabs to search by category - we even have an Everything $10 & Under tab to help you shop quickly! We have some items as low as $5, $6, $8, & $10! I will be accepting payment on my website via paypal and I offer free shipping on all domestic orders.
I hope this blog cleared up any questions you guys might have. I look forward to hopefully seeing you all again this year finally! Hopefully we can start planning some events and sales again soon too!!
If you made it this far thank you for following along, your support means the world to me and my family. Thank you for shopping small 💗
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