In the beginning, there were several trips to Bulgaria. The rose cosmetics that Martin Janota saw on every corner there gave him the idea to sell them to Czech customers as well. After three years, his e-shop is one of the largest in this field in the Czech Republic. How is Martin doing?
Pink cosmetics are very popular in Bulgaria and you started importing them to us a few years ago. How did it all start?
I have been to Bulgaria several times and on my hong kong email list fifth visit I realized that pink cosmetics are on every corner. Two or three shops stand next to each other and are operating. So I started to find out more about pink cosmetics and look around to see if similar cosmetics were available in the Czech Republic. There were some e-shops, but it seemed largest in the industry to me that it could be done even better. So I started selling on my own T-shirt.
Ruzovakosmetika.cz was definitely not the first similar e-shop. There was already competition.
Our competition consisted of about five Czech e-shops. At the beginning, we tried to establish ourselves with a relatively aggressive pricing policy. We had a detailed overview of our competitors’ prices, set a lower price, and worked with positive reviews on social networks and the e-shop. One of the competitors tried to defend us and accused us of 3 niche influencers you can use to improve your marketing being imitations and that we could not offer genuine Bulgarian pink cosmetics at such a price. However, our costs are lower than those of our competitors, so we could afford to work with the price.
Today, I dare to say that we are the largest e-shop with pink cosmetics in our country, both in terms of volumes and the breadth of products we can offer to customers.
And where do most of your customers come from? From search or from social networks?
Almost half of our e-shop customers come to us from paid search, around 25% from Facebook. We also regularly work with e-mailing, but we largest in the industry try not to overwhelm our customers. That’s why we prefer to use targeted b2c phone list campaigns, for example on Mother’s Day or Christmas.
You work with content on your own website and are also active on social media. What works best for you?
At the beginning we tried to operate on Google+, but the response was minimal. Today we use a blog and Facebook. We post posts, mainly photos, three to four times a week . We would like to create our own videos, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet.