3 years of Natural Girl Wigs.
The good, The magic & The ugly days.
I used to find emails like this very cliche, but here I am lol
First of all, Please congratulate my team & I as we celebrate 3 exciting years of building my business. It’s been an interesting ride.
I didn't start this business by mistake, you know how many people start nurturing a passion and it turns out “ this could be a business” and they pursue it? that wasn’t me.
I saw an opportunity that aligned with my interest and went for it. I built a community, tested with one product that was successful, introduced more products, shipped to thousands of customers across the world, hit 6 figures $ in our first year.
Our story is actually beautiful but it has also been crazy and the not so sexy days sometimes kill all the butterflies that come with the good days so let me walk you through some interesting days of my entrepreneur life that could possibly make it into a book.
The Ugly.
Hmnn *If I start to talk in Tiwa Savage’s voice lol
On top of Ugly days I have had was Nigerian Customs messing with me to the tune of $2500. It was so hurtful because no one even cared to respond to my queries and pleas. I will probably do a youtube video explaining everything.
Another ugly day that still hurts was when I had to let a staff go because of health reasons. He was one of my first and very trusted staff but we couldn’t afford to keep him on due to his long absence from work. I felt bad for days but that’s something about business, sometimes you have to make decisions that don’t feel good.
The Good.
There are many days I would consider Good days but two days stand out for me.
The first Black Friday of the business, It was all me running the business then. I didn’t decide to do a Black Friday sale till the morning so I just posted a few deals in the stories and the orders started coming in crazy. I didn’t eat all day, was in bed responding to messages and confirming orders. At around 11 pm my mum brought me food so I decided to count how much…. we did over 2M naira in 12hrs, I cried, laughed, and jumped. It was a really good day.
Another good day, the Shopify order alert kept coming subsequently which was strange for a non-holiday or sales day so I checked our socials if we went viral or we were being dragged lol. Didn’t see anything so I checked the website for sales source, turned out we had been featured in ESSENCE. It felt so good, I used to read this magazine growing up and a feature ranking my business in the top 10 retailers for Natural Hair extensions felt like a dream.
Since then we’ve gotten features from Cosmopolitan, Instyle, Pop Sugar amongst other Int’l platforms. It brings me joy!
The Magic.
When the pandemic hit & countries started to close borders, delivery companies were shutting down locally and the lockdown was in motion.
My staff was worried and so was I, because who cares about Wigs when the world is shutting down, no one knew what will happen next so I wrote a letter to customers assuring them we were still producing and also sharing how scared I was for the business. I got tons of emails from customers across the world telling me how much they loved the company & assuring us of their support. I felt so proud that day plus the orders that came in that month are one for the books.
There you have it, the ugly, Good & Magic days running my business so far.
P.S I haven’t forgotten the purpose of this newsletter which is to help Online businesses grow & scale beyond Instagram.
However, some things have changed;
I will be doing more than just sharing tips, It isn’t sustainable so I will be sharing more from my experience and observations in the Social/ Ecommerce space.
This Newsletter will now be bi-monthly, expect to read from me two Thursdays in a month.
I now share my business journey & tips via my Instagram https://www.instagram.com/oluremi_martins/ say hi
Thank you for indulging in my Tales,
Oluremi Martins