Reflecting on the First Year of Business

 I can compare starting your own business to having a baby - nerve-wracking, definitely challenging with highs and lows, trial and error, not much sleep but also so incredibly exciting, rewarding and I feel very proud to have made it through the first year! I am so incredibly thankful for every single order, every single customer, every follower on social media, every "like", every comment and of course all of the amazing suppliers that make such incredible products to make our website as great as possible.

The idea behind Baby Luno comes from when I couldn't find the products I wanted for my little man when he was little. After he was almost one, I then started to find all these amazing little companies, usually by other mothers, creating beautiful items that would have made my first year as a mum a lot easier (or at least a lot more beautiful) so my goal is to collect these products on one website and make them as easily accessible to mothers as possible. I am still trying to reach this goal every day and finding more and more amazing small businesses to feature on Baby Luno. These business owners, mainly women, inspire me to continue working every day!

One of my other goals is to cut shipping costs since as a frequent online buyer myself, I hate paying for shipping. At the moment we have free shipping in Australia on most products but on some products, I am actually losing money but this is actually a hit I was willing to take in this first year, since it was one of the most important things to me. I just want to get the name out there as much as possible and it is a great selling point. I hardly make any profit on parcels going overseas but there is nothing more disappointing when you are shopping online and they don't ship to where you are located so this is a must for me. My theory in the first year has mainly been to just get as many orders as possible, not necessarily making a profit on each one. Since having 10 orders gives me more motivation to keep going than having 2 orders at way more profit. I am extremely proud to say that this last month, has been our best month in sales to date so I am hoping that it continues in this way. 

I am incredible proud to say that I have done every bit myself this year from choosing our product range, designing and building our website, inventory, bookkeeping, marketing, social media, newsletters, blogging, customer service, packing parcels and posting them off. I have just now brought in some help with packing and posting off the parcels since I am currently located in the UK for the next 6 months and our stock is still in Australia. This is another exciting aspect to work with someone else (my amazing mother-in-law to be exact). Being from an online marketing background, I thought the marketing part would be the most fun but one of my favourite things is when I solve customer's issues and they tell me that I have great customer service. There is nothing more satisfying. I would love to add some more help to the team in the next few years as there are so many things that I would love to do but don't have time for at the moment but this will come.

At this time, last year, I was 33 weeks pregnant and my first-born son was almost 2 years old. Some said I was a bit silly for launching the website at that point, and it has definitely been challenging at times but in a way it has been quite positive since I am exactly my target audience. Either way, I would just like to give a shout out to my husband who has been my helping hand for the past year and been so supportive to my craziness.

I am incredibly excited to have made it a year in business and wanted to reflect on this in a blog post. I appreciate everyone's support so incredibly much! Thank you for reading and I hope to see you at babyluno.com soon!

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Lots of love,

Louise xx