103: Divine Leg’s Christine Nicholson discusses her 100 orders in 100 days eCommerce startup strategy

Christine Nicholson is the founder of Divine Legs an online only business selling tights (that’s pantyhose for our American listeners) individually and as subscriptions. Christine started Divine Legs in 5th August 2016 she hit 100 orders in the first 100 days, and things are continuing to grow, 25% of whom are subscribers.

About the business

• eCommerce Business Structure – Online Only
• Product Range Scale – niche
• In UK, selling mainly to the UK
• Team is just Christine (although book keeping and website design are outsourced)
• On Shopify built by Noir Luxe
• Plugins:
  • Pixel Perfect
  • Infinite Options
  • Recharge
  • Mailchimp
  • Xero
  • Facebook Messenger

Listen to learn why Christine is very picky about her niche products and only sells tights she can offer a money-back guarantee on.

Getting Started

Christine was at an entrepreneur’s conference to learn about scaling her existing consulting business. Michael Gerber was a speaker at the conference, and gave a profound statement that if you look at where your life is going and look at the business that you have, if it’s not a business that will help you get where you want your life to be, then your business is broken and you cannot fix it.

She took a long look at herself and realized that with the way she was working from a consulting perspective, she was never going to get where she wanted to be.

That day she was wearing a bad pair of tights. They were uncomfortable and were in rings around her ankles. She decided, even with no background in retail, eCommerce, or marketing, that after thirty years of hosiery hell, she could put eCommerce and hosiery together.

The day she got home from the conference, she ran a Google search on eCommerce experts, which led her to the eCommerce Master Plan podcast, as well as Chloe’s books on Amazon, which she purchased.

Listen to learn why 40% of Christine’s customers are men, and why hosiery is not just a product for women.

One Hundred Orders in One Hundred Days

A dream without a plan is just a dream. You have to have a plan, so set a target. Setting a target drives action, and as she learned from The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone, you have to put in massive effort to succeed. Christine set her target on having one hundred orders in her first one hundred days. She made that big thing look like a small thing by breaking it down into finding one customer per day.

Christine had started posting about Divine Legs on social media before she launched, and caught the attention of the man who runs the well-respected Hosiery for Men blog. He contacted her, and after chatting on social media, she sent him a sample of her tights and did an interview with him. He launched her interview on his blog the day that she launched Divine Legs, and within an hour and a half, one of his blog readers had placed an order.

Lessons From Christine’s One Hundred Days

One of the best lessons Christine learned from her hundred-day challenge was the value of the email list. She attended the Stylist Live Show and ran a competition that was really just a way to capture email addresses. Over twelve hundred people joined her list from that one competition. The prize for the competition was tights, so she was sure to only have the emails of people who were interested in having tights.

Christine recommends that others try similar challenges for themselves. Her goal was testing how things worked. If she did something and it generated a customer, she knew that was something she could work on to see if it would scale up. If she did something that did not generate a customer, she set it aside. She can go back to those failures later, but first, she got the stuff that worked working.

One tip she learned at a sales course was that there’s no need to worry about success or failure, because failure teaches you something. You haven’t wasted anything, but you have learned a lesson.

Listen to learn the value of ordinary mailing lists in addition to email lists.

eCommerce Book Top Tip

• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber (hear Chloe’s interview with Michael here)
• eCommerce MasterPlan by Chloe Thomas (find details of Chloe’s other books here)

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

In addition to email lists, Christine uses Facebook advertisements, which have become her biggest source of customers and traffic. She uses the technique that Chantal Wellavize of Equichoice suggested during her interview on the eCommerce Master Plan Podcast, which was to link Facebook advertisements to blog posts.

Listen to Chantal’s interview, to learn more about this traffic method.

You can hear about all this on the podcast, for free – right now…

Tool Top Tip

• Skype
• Mailchimp
• Hootsuite

Start Up Top Tip

• The sooner you start, the sooner you learn. So get started!
• Know your numbers.
• Bootstrapping will only get you so far, so spend your money very carefully.

Interview Links

• Business

Get 50% off your first hosiery box when they subscribe by using the voucher code on the website’s pop-up.

For tights without a subscription, use code “masterplan” for 20% off.

Gift wrapping is available for free upon request.

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