Website Closers® presents an exuberant eCommerce business in the niche field of personalized and custom gifts. Offering entirely exclusive SKUs on popular eCommerce hubs, this thriving brand taps into the customer’s ability to send a powerful message to a loved one, and to give a gift that has incredibly heartfelt meaning. With these personalized gifts that serve to cultivate relationships, this one-of-a-kind brand has developed a strong, loyal following that is ready to be more fully developed in the hands of a buyer.
This brand operates on three popular eCommerce sites for custom made items: Jane.com, Etsy and Amazon Handmade. The transition of gift shopping trends from brick-and-mortar stores to an online presence has been extraordinarily successful. It allows customers to search out specialized and eclectic gifts that are not brand names but that helps them send a stronger message to their loved one. Online gift shops often have items with a unique style and look, which enables them to build up a loyal customer base.
Launched just two years ago, this company has been able to expand its product line to hundreds of SKUs. Those items include color wallet inserts, necklaces, leather keychains, wallet card designs, guitar picks and many others. Billing itself as a provider of “easy gift giving for every occasion,” the brand has watched sales accelerate in the last year.
Personalization has been a key factor in the brand’s success, with customized photo items a top service that has been enlarging their customer base. That includes popular items such as engraved metal photo cards and photo guitar picks. By integrating the customer’s photos into the custom-made products, the gift helps the customer celebrate their most important moments or the people they love most. With an average order value of $20-40, this brand has experienced strong year over year sales growth.
With business practices designed to encourage upsells, this company offers a customized message and theme that can be applied to births, anniversaries, graduations, the loss of a loved one, or special occasions and celebrations. In doing so, these gifts tap into the customers’ emotions and as a result, sales have continued to get stronger as people become more familiar with this unique gift shop and the products they offer.
The brand’s popular metal wallet cards – which make up 70% of all sales – are entirely sourced in the U.S., along with their leather products. The rest of the company’s items are sourced from India and China, from suppliers that the current owner has collaborated with and developed strong relationships with over the past 10 years.
During the past two years, sales have tended to remain steady year-round, with sharp increases around popular gift-giving dates and events, including Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day and the Christmas holiday season. Sales can also rise in the weeks leading up to the holidays as customers start preparing for these crucial gift giving dates.
During these peak periods, the company can ship several hundred items per day.
The company’s SKUs appeal most strongly to women; their demographics include women between the age of 17 and 45, often purchasing gift items for their husbands, boyfriends, or fathers. The brand has also found considerable success with pet-themed gifts and receives a growing number of requests for items such as guitar picks that have photos of a beloved family pet on it.
A fast-growing percentage of this brand’s sales now come from repeat customers.
This brand has done well on all three of its sales platforms. The listings on Jane.com make up half of all sales. Jane limits the type of products that can be offered on its site, so this brand has low competition there and is included in the market efforts that the site does. That’s helped the brand to enjoy organic traffic that has made this company a top seller on Jane.
Etsy makes up 35% of sales, and the brand has enjoyed a sky-high 5 Star Sellers rating from its customers there. The company has a similarly high 4.5 Star Seller Rating on Amazon Handsome, which represents a growing 15% of sales.
Operating on Jane and Etsy have been greatly beneficial in terms of marketing. Etsy ads are promoted by the host site, and the brand has received 53,000+ visitors to that site so far this year.
The organic traffic that both of these eCommerce sites generate has enabled this business to boost sales without employing more traditional marketing tactics, such as social media and email marketing campaigns, or an SEO program that includes a blog. That represents one of the clearest and most assured ways to scale this business. The brand could launch posts on popular social media sites such as Facebook, Pinterest and TikTok, while running ads on and making items available for sale on Facebook and Instagram. This enables the brand to drive the discovery and sales of their products where customers are already shopping – on these social media giants followed by millions.
There are other options for growing this business at an exponential rate. One would be to continue expanding the SKUs, providing customers with more choices. Rather than finding variations on products already being sold, the company could develop new ones.
That could include a new and much larger number of products that are geared around pets. So far, sales indicate that pet products attract a large customer base.
The company could also double down on efforts to build up a larger customer base on Amazon, which is an obvious path for stronger revenues. That could include running PPC ads on Amazon and using SEO keywords in the product descriptions to boost traffic. As Amazon remains considerably larger than either Jane or Etsy, there is massive potential to scale rapidly through this approach.
Because this brand’s products are specially crafted and not available anywhere else, the current owner has offered to remain onboard post-acquisition to help the new owner succeed at making this company profitable. This sale would include the company’s 3 Epilog Laser Engravers, two of them brand new and fully warranted, that are critical for making the engraved products they sell.
Because of the current owner’s hands-on involvement in making the products, the owner works as much as 60 hours per week during peak times, although the workload is much lower during non-peak times. During peak times one person is needed to ship orders.
This company has developed a strong footing in the niche field of personalized gift giving, and the emotional appeal of the brand’s products and the desire to use gift giving to make a strong statement has brought this company a lot of repeat business. Having accomplished this much in just two years, the brand is well positioned to use advanced marketing techniques and improved use of Amazon to take profits to the next level.
