The An'du Story - Part 5

Part 5 - Starting to Sell

With bars and packaging created, we both felt that we were on the home run. Neither of us having been in retail jobs, building a brand was a phrase for other brands, not ours. There was a vague belief  that a good product would sell itself - with no understanding that even if you had the best product in the world- people still need to hear about it in order to buy it.

Retail regulations, websites, insurance, manufacturing to scale were all theoretical problems, soon to become reality. 

We genuinely believed that we had climbed the  mountain and our bars would sell themselves.  Evidently we were wrong.

I can't remember who thought about it first, but somehow questions arose around health and safety and accompanying regulations around selling personal care products. Up until this point we had been making the bars in our kitchen and testing them on ourselves, friends and family. But what if we sold one to someone unknown and they had a reaction to it? Or what if someone claimed they'd had a reaction, but actually hadn't. How would we cover ourselves?

 Research unearthed the GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) for personal care products - a code to follow for safe, reliable and repeatable manufacturing. Our kitchen was not a place where GMP could be undertaken - especially not with a dog in the corner. There was a dawning realisation that outsourcing our manufacturing would be necessary. With the remit of keeping the manufacturing in the UK we set about searching for small manufacturers who had the capacity and equipment to manufacture small batches of our bars to our specification.  

 

Lessons from choosing a manufacturer

The next part of this story has actually already got it's own separate blog post that mum wrote and you can find it here (I would highly recommend this blog post - it's. great read). It was, to put it simply, a calamity of errors that resulted in us losing stock, being sent a pink dress instead of samples and us now being on our third manufacturer. I will let mum tell the full story, because she was the one spearheading most of this part of the business and dealing with the absurd levels of stress that came with it. 

Throughout this process though, we grew from one bar - our Back to Basics to a range of 9 including conditioner bars as well as shampoos. We had purchased a little contactless card machine and launched our bars at Sparkle Christmas Fair in Teddington Landmarks Arts Centre. We had even sold a few bars online through the card machine's very basic e-commerce store. 

Everything was in its infancy including the postal packaging for online sales - we started with a paper template which transferred to some recycled cardboard. Effective but not reproducible en mass, or very professional looking - but worked perfectly well for the first few orders. 

 

The Launch

We were at the tail end of the pandemic; masks, hand gel and a fear of anyone with a cough were still order of the day. My rising excitement at the thought of officially launching our bars at Sparkle Christmas Fair was dashed when I tested positive for Covid the day before. Mum and my wonderful sister ended up selling together on the first day with Mum and my equally wonderful husband on the second day. I will for ever be grateful for my sister and husband stepping in so last minute! On asking mum what stood out at the launch - the answer is support received from family and friends. An old school friend of hers came all the way from Kent to be the first buyer while all her Sheen friends turned up en mass. Big company launches might be full of glitz and glamour with press and superstars. But, for most of us, as it has been throughout this process, family and friends support is way more valuable than glamour and glitz.  

The launch was a success and we finally had proof of concept. Although we had done a bit of market research before we developed these bars, as they had grown rather organically, with the intent to sell only really appearing towards the end of the process, we hadn’t fully understood the market or need for our product. We based most of our hopes on the fact that if we loved the idea and the concept then others would too. Luckily for us, this turned out to be true and of course the market for sustainable products is steadily growing as consumer consciousness begins to take the environmental impact of their purchasing into account. Despite the rise of websites like Shein and Temu, we still believe that conscious purchasing is the only way forwards and we are happy to say that we now have over 500 of you who agree with us!

 

The website

The next step for us was a website. We had started up a Facebook Page and an Instagram account and my supportive cousin in New Zealand, having seen our posts,  reached out and offered help with developing our website for us. We were thrilled and set about organising Zoom meetings to try and figure out what we wanted and how it would work. Our first and rather obvious problem was the time difference. Although my cousin was somewhat of a night owl and managed to  accommodate our UK times as best he could, communication became a bit of a challenge. We also knew nothing about website development and coding and it turned out that some of the things that we were asking him to do were actually incredibly time consuming/ difficult things to achieve. This not withstanding, my cousin produced a stunning website that we were over the moon with. 

Our biggest issue at this point became problem solving along the way. This, we realised, was a dilemma we would have with any external developer, in that when something didn't work, or we wanted to do something differently, instead of simply doing it ourselves we had to go through a third party. In this case, our third party was working on our site alongside raising a family of 3 young children and working a full time job during the day, several time zones away. If we ever wanted something done quickly, it was not easy to do so. This realisation also coincided with our manufacturer's going into administration and going silent on us; refusing to answer emails or calls while still holding thousands of pounds worth of our raw materials.

It's fair to say that moral was pretty low and it was at this point that we seriously thought about calling it quits with An'du. 

Instead, we decided to put everything on pause for a while, re-group and re-evaluate our best way forwards. 

We hit pause on selling and temporarily closed down our website. Mum and I spoke at length, both with each other and our respective partners about what to do. Our family holiday in Wales became somewhat An'du conversation dominated. We decided in the end to give it one last shot including setting out some time limited targets and strategies, making the deal that if we hadn't met those targets we would wind things down. 

The targets were modest and not sales based. We set out structural ones around organisational needs in order to be able to sell easily. One of these big changes was deciding to try and build our own websites through one of these 'no code' platforms. We ended up using Shopify which although (once again) has been a huge learning curve, has ended up working well for our particular needs. 

Interestingly, up until this point, mum and I had been doing pretty much everything together, but now our roles started to diverge. Mum took on a lot more of the behind the scenes donkey work (insurance, applications, finance etc) and I took on the website, marketing and selling side of it. They were roles that we naturally felt a little more comfortable with, although I wouldn't say that either of us were particularly inside our comfort zones. Somewhere on the edge moving to wildly outside would probably be a more accurate description of us both relative to our comfort zones at varying parts of the An'du journey. 

These are still, roughly, the same roles we sit in today, although they do overlap considerably at times. One of the very best things about working with mum is that we have this wonderful flexibility with our job. When one of us is snowed under with other ‘life stuff’ the other picks up the slack and keeps things moving. We recently made an Instagram post for world gratitude day, and as cheesy as it sounds, I stand by what I said: I will be forever grateful to be able to work with my mum doing something I love. It has not been without its stresses, but I think because it’s something we both believe so passionately about and because we enjoy working together so much, it’s something we want to keep doing.

 I fear this blog post has been rather 'rambly' covering several years while imparting minimal information - which on reflection, succinctly summed up our position: one of trying hard with not much to show for including  disappointments  and difficulties completely beyond our control.  

Slowly, without getting it from a book, but living it 'real time' we were coming to terms with running a small business, growing a thicker more realistic skin, while maintaining faith in the original product and concept.  

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1 comment

Such a great read, and really reminds me of your faith, resilience, courage, and enormous energy in pushing your amazing product further and further. Great job, ladies and keep on keeping on! X

Carol Crawley

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