Love Aroma’s Lewis Love 400% growth, and achieving £1m turnover in 2 years selling Yankee Candles (episode 086)

by Chloë Thomas

Joining us today is Lewis Love, the eCommerce Manager of Love Aroma. Love Aroma is a bricks and clicks retailer that opened the first shop in 2010 and launched the online business in 2014. They specialize in curating best range of home fragrances. They have fulfilled over 60,000 orders in 2016 and are on track to do £1 million turnover!

This is the seventh of our ‘2017 eCommerce Growth Series Sponsored by Veeqo the Number 1 Inventory Software’. The series will be running throughout January and is packed with insight and advice to help you make 2017 your best year yet. Find the full series here.

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About the business

  • eCommerce Business Structure – Bricks and Clicks, with 10 stores
  • Product Range Scale – niche
  • Use VisualSoft to sell online, a UK-based managed service platform.
  • Primarily selling to the UK market

Listen to hear how they focus on creating unique content for 2,000+ products and sales pages.

Most Awesome Thing Right Now

Definitely the growth we’ve seen! We’ve put a lot of focus on web site and the web site team has started to think of the site as pure play eCommerce. If we didn’t have the stores what would we be doing right now? That’s allowed us to focus on growing the web site, and we are currently seeing 300% and 400% year over year growth as a result of focusing on driving sales and revenue growth.

Listen to hear more about how….

eCommerce Book Top Tip

  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. It’s not always rosy, it’s tough growing a business and launching online! The reason Lewis really likes this book is because it cuts through the glossy talk, and tells it straight how it is.

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

  • Hot UK Deals, it’s a forum based in the UK that allows people to post deals they’ve seen online or in stores that they think others will enjoy. If you can get to the front page of Hot UK Deals your server crashes! The traffic that it can produce is absolutely incredible.

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

Tool Top Tip

Two applications for customer inquiries:

  • Help Scout – allows customers to email a standard address but all emails are brought into one application where our team can access them no matter where they are in the world. We can also see who is replying to which customer and prioritize tickets.
  • Air Call – allows us to have our phone and our main support line anywhere in the world, and it works over the internet. We can login online or via an iPhone. So we can direct phones to the warehouse or at home if required.

Start Up Top Tip

  • Know your margin, down to the penny!
  • Know exactly how much it costs to buy the product that you are selling.
  • Know exactly how much it costs to sell the product across all the channels you are selling it on.
  • Know exactly how much it costs to ship that product out, the packaging materials, every last thing!
  • Know the overheads you incur, know everything down to the last penny.
  • Without knowing that you are blindly selling and don’t know if you are making any money. It’s so easy to give away too much of the pie when it comes to online retail. Everyone is willing to offer you something for nothing; of course they want 5% of your revenue or 10%, and before you know it you have nothing left.

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