069: Studio 15’s Jia Wertz masterclass on fashion startups inc popups and social media (10,000 customers in 12 months)

Jia Wertz is the founder of Studio 15 a women’s boutique with a difference. Not only do they design and sell stunning dresses, they focus on donating money to help women in developing countries build a better life for themselves. Founded in 2014, after a year of beta they launched to the public and now they have a customer list of 10,000, and have funded 30 business startups in Africa.

Click to Tweet: Jia Wertz on @eComMasterPlan #podcast – how her business Studio 15 balances profit and social responsibility

About the business

• eCommerce Business Structure – Online Only
• Product Range Scale – niche
• On a Magento platform
• 4 people in the business – 2/3 interns and a lot of freelancers
• Based in the US, selling to the US & Canada
• Key widgets in the website:
  • Alerts pro – hosting provider

Listen to hear how Jia Wertz got started in eCommerce

Most Awesome Thing Right Now

Jia really appreciates how small and agile Studio 15 is at the moment it means they can respond to things really quickly. Also despite the difficulties the business has experienced they haven’t wavered from their original mission for the business.

Listen to hear more about how about Studio 15’s business goals

Top Tips on Driving Traffic to your Website

Studio 15 have found that their pop-up fashion events have worked really well.  With their New York fashion week pop they had over 500 people turn up and transition to new customers. The event was held in partnership with a number of other local businesses – they offered free pampering making the pop-up up shop more of an event.

Jia mainly uses social media for driving traffic to her site. She learnt about a cool widget Snip.ly which adds a pop up to the bottom of any article, on any website, that you share on social media – it can be programmed to say whatever you want and link to anywhere you like. Studio 15’s distributed content is at a ratio of 40% own to 60% other relevant industry content – so when sharing content from vogue for example their pop up appears on the vogue site.

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

eCommerce Book Top Tip

Successful SEO and Search Marketing in a Week by Nick Smith

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

Jia thinks that Pinterest is a great platform if you have products – Instagram posts have a short lifespan, Pinterest posts are searchable and have a much increased lifespan.

Tool Top Tip

The Studio 15 team use HipChat and is great if you have remote team members. It’s like a Facebook messenger for the business environment it incorporates document sharing, project management and team communication all in one place.

Start Up Top Tip

Jia suggest that you do your research on keywords – then integrate those keywords into your business name, into your url and anywhere else that you can. The internet space is so crowded Jia suggests that you need to make sure that it is easy for your customers to find you.

Interview Links

• ShopStudio15.com
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest

Jia recently launched a new venture, The Mastermind Exchange, which is a peer-to-peer advisory group that helps other startups accelerate their growth and avoid the types of mistakes she made in the beginning. The Mastermind Exchange guides founders to the right solutions for their day to day business struggles so they don’t have to waste time and money when they are new to the market. If you’re interested in joining, you can contact Jia at jia@themastermindx.com.

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