Need For Speed: Most Wanted Limited Edition Fre... __HOT__

Marissa: I was pretty much dead on. That was the funny part. This was the most hilarious part about this whole thing, is I got these planners. I started selling them in August. I remember the day that I launched my Shopify Store, I got one order and I was panicking. I was like, "Oh, my God. If I sell one planner all month, or in the next four months, what am I going to do?" It was that moment when I was like, "Okay. I need to figure this out." I got creative with getting my product out there. I started my business in the heyday of Instagram. When Instagram was just becoming this thing what now brands were using, and bloggers were using, and people were using to get influencer status. There were no influencers back then. So reaching out to bloggers who all had blogs, who were writing blogs, was a lot easier because a lot of them at the time we're looking for content because they didn't have these big brands gifting them things. It was more so a new thing where you would reach out to someone and be like, "Hey, I'll give you free product if you write a blog post." When this whole heyday of Instagram was happening, I was sending out product to these people that were bloggers at the time. Basically, what I did is I would strategically send out two or three a month. And then there was a chance that a customer or somebody would see the same planner on maybe two or three different platforms a few weeks apart. Maybe they followed blogger X, blogger Y, and blogger Z. Maybe they see it on blogger X and Z's posts. The second or third time that you see something you're like, "Oh, I've seen this before. I think I should get this." That's basically what ended up happening. I set myself up in this way where people just kept seeing it here and there, a couple of weeks apart. It was quite easy for me to reach out to people that I was following whose content I really cherished myself and that I enjoyed reading. So it was easy for me to reach out and say, "I've been following you for a year. I've been reading your posts, and here's what I love about your style, whatever. I feel like you could benefit from using this planner." At the time, it was just so easy to send out a gift. The other thing that I did was I really wanted to get my planner onto a big retailer shelf. And so, I ended up reaching out multiple times to Chapters Indigo, which is our biggest bookseller in Canada. They rejected me I think eight or nine times. And then the 10th time, somebody was like, "Okay. Well, send us a sample, and then we'll see what happens." Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, they ended up placing an order for 200 units that they sold in three days. During those three days, I sold out of everything in my own store. Before the year ended - 2015 - I was completely sold out of the product, and I had nothing to sell.

Need For Speed: Most Wanted Limited Edition Fre...

Marissa: Honestly, I think I was getting really annoying. So they were just like, "Screw it. We'll just deal with this." What ended up being the defining factor is that they requested three copies that they were going to send to a few different people to review. The overall feedback had been that this is a trend that they've been seeing in the planner community, maybe a bit of a niche of something that they haven't seen before. This was in the age of when Kate Spade was really big, and everyone wanted everything, Kate Spade. So, my planner fit in with that aesthetic. It's not an aesthetic that I identify with anymore. But when I was 24, it made sense. It aesthetically fit really well into the lifestyle that their customer, or at least their female customer, was experiencing at the time. And obviously, it ended up working out really well. They only sold online. We ended up being on their shelves two years later. We did a limited edition series of planners for Indigo two years after that. We were physically on the shelf then. However, I'm going to put a disclaimer here. I do not recommend working with a big retailer like that. It was not a good experience for me. It was a really incredible learning experience for me. But I do not recommend small businesses to get involved with companies like that. 041b061a72