The year 2020 was all about being thankful.
The pandemic vanished many lives, people lost jobs, we had to accept the “new normal”. Among all these chaos, one thing we all realized was to start being thankful for things we already have like family. This year 2021 is all about focusing on developing a stronger connection with loved ones, that keeps getting better with time. Let’s admit that personalization in gifting makes that thing 100 times easier.
The research done by PR NewsWire states that the market of personalized gifts is aimed to reach 43.3 billion worldwide by 2027.
This clearly states that gifts still keep our spirits high no matter what the occasion is. And when we say personalized gifting, it has a strong emotional connection between two people. Well, I would love it if I received a personalized gift of a wooden organizer more than a usual one that I can keep on my work-from-home setup.
So, if you are thinking of starting a personalized gift business, it can be your win-win solution for starting a new venture in this ever-growing industry. So, here it is, literally everything you need to figure out the question “how to start personalized gift business”
A quick roadmap to the entire post!
- Target Audience
- It’s Time to Create Your Gift Business Plan
- Legal Work
- How to take personalized gift business online:
- How you can offer personalized gifts in your store
- Select product Supplier
- Selecting printing methods
- Marketing Strategies
Target Audience
First thing first, gifts are for everyone! So, when starting a customized gifts business, it is important to have clarity on your target audience. As it will help you to understand your audience better and on the basis of that, you can decide your products. You can either target B2B or B2C business or both of them. B2C means dealing directly with end customers. Whereas B2B segments include business audiences that you want to target.
According to me, it is better to start with B2C as it will help you to learn more and create your profile. Then later on you can move to B2B easily. Knowing your market and target audience gives you more clarity about your business and knows the market value of that business. It helps in having more focus and knowing customers’ better.
It’s Time to Create Your Gift Business Plan
When planning, deciding the budget for your business is a crucial phase. Here, the more detailed you are with a gift business plan, the better it is for your business. Because it helps you get necessary insights and make better decisions for your personalized gift business. You can know which verticals require more investment. On the basis of your budget planning you can define your next quarter plans.
Some of the major reasons of planning a budget is:
- You know the flow of investment
- Decreases unnecessary expense
- Have more clarity on your business verticals
- Take better decision in regards of future trends
- Can help in attracting right business investors.
When you are starting a customized gifts business, you will have to take care of a lot of things. Like know your market, launch website, marketing, offline store (if needed), each product cost etc. The proper planning will give you a better understanding of where your attention should be.
Just imagine, if you multiple things on your plate but don’t know where to focus more, invest more, customers’ needs, and more. It can become chaotic this is when your planned budget will come to your rescue.
Legal Work
Starting a personalized gift business means you need to be ready to do lots of paperwork. Every business needs to have necessary licenses and registrations work to be done. So before starting out any business it is important you reach out to business registration offices and complete all formalities.
Get all the necessary licenses needed in your district to carry out business. Once this is done you can reach out to needed logistics and vendor management companies. Your business will be online and so timely delivery is necessary this is when logistics and vendor management will come to your rescue.
Our team at Brush Your Ideas has helped numerous gift businesses. We can help you too in setting up your business from scratch.
Once you are done with all the necessary business registrations next comes taking business online. It is safe to say that with COVID scenario, everything is going online. With economical investment, you get good returns. For that, multiple things goes into taking things online. Let’s see each of them one by one:
How to take personalized gift business online
Select e-Commerce platform
Today there are thousands of platforms available which help to create an eStore platform. Each of them has their merits and demerits. Some of the famous and most used platforms are: Shopify, Joomla, Drupal, etc.
As per your requirements, you can choose the platform to create an entire eStore from the scratch. For example, do you self-host your store or want a platform that provides hosted eStore? The same way, compare the features and of course the pricing. Let’s say Shopify plans will be a little less heavy in pocket than the Magento ones. However, if your budget allows, Magento is one of the best platforms to go for!
Finalize Features
Once you have selected your suited solution for developing a website the next step comes is finalizing features. Depending on your business model and recent market trends you can define various features for your website.
Some of the basic and much needed features for your personalized gift business is: payment gateway for online transactions, add to cart functionality, adding items in wish lists, in detail product description, clear images of various personalized gifts, and more.
One of the best ways to define your features is doing thorough market research, studying your competitors, etc. this will help you know in depth and exact things your customers need.
Choose development partner
When it comes to developing your eStore for your customized gifts business there are two options available:
- Freelancing
- Choosing the right technical partner
Of course, each of them have their benefits but I prefer reaching out to the right technical partner.
Getting in touch with the right technical partner can help you with their expertise. They have been in the industry for decades with a strong client base to show. Their set of experienced employees guides startup companies in the right direction. This is what sets them apart from freelancers. Lastly, security being the main concern with the IT companies you don’t need to worry at all. As they have a strong infrastructure of security.
Being a founder of a startup company, it is better to get in touch with the right technical partner and give your business wings to fly.
Once you have finally found your technical partner, it is time to decide the most important thing for your store. The products.
This section will guide you on how you can provide personalized gifts and make your custom gifts business a success.
How you can offer personalized gifts in your store
Personalized gifts include a wide spectrum of products like Mugs, Greeting cards, Pillows, T-shirts, Jewelry sets, etc. Based on the audience for your customized gifts business, that you can finalize. The important part is how you want to go about personalization in these products. Because when it comes to personalization, people have different choices. How would you accommodate them in your offerings?
Imagine, your customers want to send a personalized gift to their family members or friends. They call you at the shop, or while placing orders online they write down specifications like designs, colors, etc. And on the basis of this you create needed design.
This is the conventional way but often comes with a risk of going wrong with the given directions. This is when a product designer tool comes to your rescue.
Integrating a product designer tool to your website provides your customers with the freedom to create their own designs from the range of given products. This decreases unnecessary redundant communication with your customers.
Benefits of using product designer tool:
- Customers can show their creativity and design products on their own
- Easy navigation and appealing UI/UX makes it easy to create designs and use tool efficiently
- Feature rich library with multiple font types, images, clip arts, object handling, and more
- Design range of products like t-shirts, gifts, mugs, cushion covers, mobile back covers, pin buttons, and more.
- Compatible with all eCommerce platforms and multi-language websites
How providing an online eStore will help your business to grow:
Having an eStore for your personalized gift business is an essential thing. This will let your customers know about your brand and get exclusive insights about your products. Additionally, you can know details about your loyal customers, their needs, feedback, and more.
Let’s see some of the major reasons of having your own eStore for your personalized gift business:
- Brand building
This is one of the major benefits of having your own website. Customers and your market will be aware about your brand. This in turn, helps your custom gifts business to flourish, make more connections, better marketing, and branding of your services.
- Avoid price war
Personalized gift offerings help you to reach customers better. It will help you save majorly without a need to share it with any partners. You have full authority to decide prices of your products, delivery charges, shipping charges national or international, and if any additional charges are needed.
- Complete business autonomy
This will give you more freedom to set your own rules for your personalized gift business and other services you provide. Rather than following other marketplaces’ rules and regulations having this option is better.
- Faster and better customer service
Providing better customer service is very important. Many third party platforms will help you with services but in many cases, it is not up to the mark. This is when setting up your own personalized gift business eStore using effective third party services for customer service is better. This will provide faster and better services to your customers.
- Better customer loyalty and retention
Your customized gifts business eStore will not only give your better reach but will also help you in knowing your customer loyalty and retention. To make your business known it is important to have a loyal customer base and having an eStore will help.
Using different marketing tools, you can inform your customers about new products or services. Apart from this, you can also introduce new loyalty programs like discounts on products, free delivery, some vouchers on shopping above mentioned limit, etc.
This will help you to have loyal customers and better customer service will help you to retain customers.
- Services available round the clock
Physical location comes with restrictions of having restricted areas of services and business working hours. But, taking your personalized gift business online will be devoid of all these issues. You can provide customer services around the clock. They can place orders anytime from anywhere. Additionally, having international customers will give your business more exposure.
Select the Right Gift design tool
There are multiple tools available to create different designs for your mugs. But, there are some basic features which these tools need. Let’s see some of them in brief:
- Multilingual Support
Having a tool which supports a multi-language website is important. You need to make sure that your tool supports multiple languages. This will help your personalized gift business to stand out of the crowd and have an international customer base.
- Feature rich library
Make sure the tool is having a thousand plus font types, variety of images, clip art support, object handling, and more. This will let your customers give more ideas and support to create an array of designs. Additionally, you can even make sure to have a better customer experience.
- Compatibility with eCommerce platforms
Your website can be made using any programming language. This is one of the major reasons why you need to have your tool which integrates with any platform.
- Support thousand plus products
Being a custom gifts business owner, you will have to give your customers multiple products to design. Thus, you have to make sure that your product design tool can provide multiple products to your customers. This will eventually lead to having better customer service and satisfaction.
- 3D Preview
Today most of the things have gone online and this is when you provide your customers the feel of offline shopping. 3D preview makes the job easy. Once the design is ready your customers should be able to preview it in 3D view. This will provide customers with better judgment about their product design, look and fill. To know more how it would work with your store, you can check the live demo of our tool here.
Select product Supplier
Once you are done with setting up your eStore, the next step is connecting with suppliers. You will be providing an array of products to your customers. This is when you will need the right supplier that fulfills your needs.
Reach out to various suppliers in your area and tie a deal with them about different products. Simultaneously, also know your customers’ needs and get product deals accordingly. Meeting suppliers will help you have a better supply of products.
Selecting printing methods
There are various printing methods available for printing your product. Majorly 3 types of methods are used for printing services. The type of products you use also influences your printing method. Below are some of the common printing methods:
- Screen printing
This type of printing is most commonly used while printing t-shirts and taking bulk orders. The benefit is its prints lasts longer and provides consistent printing. However, it takes a bit more time to print.
- Digital Photo Mug Printing
It is a process that prints an image or design directly onto a specially coated paper. It offers full-color and permanent artwork look, it is an excellent method to print images or text in high quality let’s say for mugs.
- Embroidered printing
This is the oldest printing method used to carry out printing. It uses sewing machines for designing. People prefer this type of printing as it looks original, regal, and there are very less chances of design coming out.
You can also reach out to other printing vendors, tie up business deals with them, and send them printing orders. This will require less investment, give some share to vendors, and also make your customers happy. Reach out to various known vendors in your proximity, ask them certain questions like:
- Which printing methods do they have?
- Can they print design on products you provide?
- What will be their cost per product and design?
Lastly, if things go well for you and your customized gifts business, then you can sign a business agreement with them. Hence, on the basis of your budget decide which method is suitable for you and move forward with it.
Marketing Strategies
Marketing strategies play a vital role for any business. Once you are done with creating an eStore for your personalized gift business, providing a wide range of products and services, integrating product designer tools, etc. Then comes marketing. It is important to market your business via different channels.
There are many methods to market your customized gifts business and make it reach a wider audience. Some of them are: PPC, SEO, influencer marketing, collaborating with brands, partnering with other popular eStores, social media marketing, and more. Each of them has their merits and drawbacks.
If you are looking to rank your website on Google then you can go forward with either PPC or SEO strategies. Go with PPC if looking for instant results and ranking or SEO for 6 to 8 months of duration.
Influencer marketing is a new way to promote your business. You can reach out to various social media influencers and tie up a promotional deal with them. They have a very huge impact if your target audience is GenZ and millennials.
Apart from this, you can start social media marketing and reach a wider audience. Lastly, collaborate with other popular eStores, upload your product images, and increase your sales.
Over to you
Starting your own personalized gift business can be difficult. But, following the above discussed steps will be helpful. Additionally, seeking help from experienced IT businesses will ease the process.
Brush your Ideas has served since over a decade to businesses like yours to help them make a remarkable impact with personalized offerings. Stepping up in starting a personalized gift business is certainly a great idea, but you need the right tools to succeed. The Product Designer tool is our flagship product available with major features to ease the process for end users. To see how it would work with your store, you can get in touch with us and our team will be happy to help!
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