As made famous by Oprah Winfrey: Passion is Energy and building a business around fashion is something that I was always passionate about. In 2014, I started an online store called Online Bazaare selling women’s fast fashion in the Philippines. I started small with just an Instagram account and my savings to purchase initial inventory. In just a few months, I was able to grow my Instagram followers to nearly 5,000 and was making decent profits.
As the 2014 Ber months ended, I was one of the first few invited to sell on Shopee Philippines. This was exciting and the 2015 launch of Shopee, in under a year expanded Online Bazaare from an Instagram account to two online stores.
As customers grew, it became harder for me to manage my small profitable business. I was spending more and more time working in the business rather than on my business and delighting my customers and increasing my profits. My regular customers started to feel disappointed as I would be frequently out of stock as I was unable to track demand, sales and more. In fact, I lost track of my costs too and wasn’t sure if my online stores were still profitable. I was suffering from solopreneur burnout and I shut down Online Bazaare in 2016.
From having a nice profitable business in a few months that was growing, I had to shut it down for lack of resources and help. I also realized selling via Instagram is very different from selling on marketplaces like Shopee. To be successful across various online channels requires different tactics. I dearly wished that software to help manage online stores had empathy with me as an online seller and cared about how I could save time implementing growth tactics and increase my profit margins. It turns out its not just me who wanted a solution to manage and grow an online business profitably and a group of engineers cared about it too. More on that in a bit.
Though I had to shut down my online store, I became very passionate about finding ways to help online sellers like me become successful and prevent them from shutting down their thriving business due to lack of time and money . I started looking for CS jobs at startups trying to build innovative solutions to help online sellers. This was a good way for me to help online sellers in a more scalable way while learning what makes online selling profitable.
Eventually, 6 years later in 2022, I heard about Konigle - a startup in Singapore, started by a bunch of engineers having deep empathy for helping online sellers succeed at e-commerce. They were building Konigle to help online sellers manage and grow their store profitably and wanted someone to help them support and grow the small community around the product. The team at Konigle is passionate about finding growth tactics for profitable online selling and then automating it into an easy-to-use product. This is the exact product I wish I had 6 years ago. I am thrilled to be part of the rocket ship that Konigle is and to play my part in making sure every online seller succeeds at e-commerce.
What is even better, an online seller can start using Konigle for free and after a very generous free tier, it costs $15/month which is less than ₱900 in the Philippines (just the right amount to save you from the weekly calories of your Starbucks frappe), which really helps scale your online business and not burden you with expensive software fees.
I know that this can become one of the favorite budol tips of online sellers as with this price, you’ll get to be empowered with tools that can help you implement tactics such as discovering trending products to sell in Shopee, auto boosting your products to increase visibility and easy inventory management that helps you monitor your stocks and your costs. This can set you up for great success in running profitable online stores.