How I STARTED, LAUNCHED and MARKETED My NEW BUSINESS & SOLD OUT! 💰

Welcome back to another Fros in Focus Friday where I tell you how to build your brand and monetize it. My name is Joi Wade, and today we're talking about how I started, launched, and branded my new haircare brand Joiful Bee. We specialize in unique hair tools for curly hair that helps our customers establish a consistent healthy hair routine and fall back in love with wash day. The day I launched, my business was absolutely amazing. I was able to bring a product to my audience of over 200,000 women interested in curly hair care and sold out of our initial stock in just a weekend.

So we are going to get into the five phases that it took to start my haircare brand, research, branding, development, content prep, and launch prep. If you have any questions, make sure you leave them down below. These phases apply to launching or starting any business, whether it's online or physical products. I hope this video is helpful to any of you guys who are looking to start your brand. Also, I have a free personal branding guide for you, that's going to tell you how to refresh your personal brand in seven days. So check out that link below.

The first stage of building my haircare brand was the research stage or the ideation phase. I went through about two notebooks of writing ideas and planning the launch. It was essential for me to have my audience involved in planning my haircare brand. I sent a survey to 300 black women with kinky, coily natural hair. And I asked them questions like, what's missing in the natural hair community? What's your wash day routine like? Where do you buy your products? That's how I got feedback into building the brand. I also thought about my hair care routine. I thought about what products and tools that I use myself. Based on my audience feedback and my personal experience, I decided that I was going to come out with a kit that had five central hair tools to get through wash day.

And I was going to make sure all of those five tools solved my customer pain points. Which were keeping their hair moisturized, easily detangling, and preventing breakage/ seeing growth. I mentioned customer pain points because these are important when developing a brand or product. Think of a product or service that solves a problem that your customers are currently having. Getting feedback from your audience is super important to see what problems they're having and seeing if your new product can solve them. Also, in the research stage, I decided on the name of my brand. So the brand is called Joiful Bee. It's a twist on my childhood nickname, which was Joi B. My siblings call me Joi B all the time, and that's what I name the brand to be. One important thing to take into account when you're starting any type of business or brand is the legal aspects. I created an LLC for Joiful Bee as its business structure. I also trademarked the name Joiful Bee to protect all of the current and future assets that Joiful Bee will have. Between starting the LLC, and trademarking my assets I spent about $1,000.

Phase two is my favorite because it's about branding. So I'm going to tell you some of the things I did to build the brand of Joiful Bee. I started with a mood board which is a collage, where you pin images of things you like that fit the aesthetic and vision for the brand. I made a mood board on Instagram and made a saved folder. Once I had the aesthetic going, I started thinking about the logo. So I love graphic design, and this is where you might want to bring in a professional designer. I've taken classes at USC that and designed for different brands. So I worked on the logo, I made many different variations of the logo, until I came up with the one I use now.

Then I worked on the brand guide which is a document that shows your logos, alternative logos, brand colors, fonts, and any type of other inspiration for the brand. This is great to refer back to when you're building things for social media and building the website. It's also for building any print or physical assets or just designing the brand packaging colors and products. And lastly, for branding, I decided on the voice and mood of the brand. So deciding on how your brand talks and how your brand feels is really important because when you're writing copy, or the written elements of your brand for social media, website, email, communications, and other marketing you want to sound the same across all those different platforms. I also wanted it to be empowering. We use the word queen a lot to reference our audience and customers. We talk from a perspective as though customers are very informed about their natural hair.

So somewhere between the research and the branding phase, I bought my domain for my website. While I was brainstorming and figuring out if I wanted to do the brand, I had that secured so no one can take it. I always recommend as soon as you have an idea for a brand name, get the domain. I use Google domains because it lists all your domains in one place, and it connects it to your Gmail account. They have reasonable-priced domains that are about $12.

Phase three of building my haircare brand, Joiful Bee was product development. This is where I started to take the information from my research and combine it with my branding. Knowing what my audience wanted, and knowing the aesthetic of the brand I wanted to create, I decided to start building products. I went on different manufacturing websites and found people who were in the fields of the products I wanted to make. For example, one of the items that I have is a microfiber towel. I researched textile manufacturers and saw who could develop a prototype. When you work with a manufacturer, you have to provide them with the colors, logo dimensions, minimum quantities, and more. When you're starting your brand, you have to order a certain number of items to get the wholesale price for it. Especially if you're manufacturing a product from scratch, the minimums are way higher, rather than buying something that's already made in bulk. So for all my items, they had to be made from scratch, so I had to order a little bit higher volume of items.

Once you have found the right manufacturer, which requires some patience, they'll send you samples and swatches, but then you'll have to make a down payment to get samples with your logos on them. So throughout October and November of 2018, I got my samples in and I got to test them. I have used them every wash day since 2019. Then, I'll get some of my friends and family to try it out. And I checked for quality. So obviously not everything goes right during the sample phase, I had to make a couple of changes to the towel and detailing brush. Every time you make changes, the process gets pushed back further and further. Be patient during the sample phase and don't try to rush things. This phase is pretty lengthy. Another part of the manufacturing process is also figuring out what type of packaging you want your product to come in.

I decided that I wanted my product to come in a custom box. I had to find somebody who can make the boxes for a price that I can afford. So once again, when you're doing packaging, you have to get samples as well. And you have to get them made and make those down payments. So this is the most expensive part of the process. For example, getting a sample of a towel with my logo on it cost me $80. Have a budget set aside, because you're gonna have to spend a couple of hundred dollars.

So after you test everything, and you finally approve all the samples that they send you, you will make a deposit on a purchase order. Then, you need to tell them the quantity of the items you want and how you want them shipped to you. And then you have your final invoice and you pay a deposit. And then they start manufacturing your products, and in about a month, you receive your products. And that varies in time. So for example, I had to push back my launch date a whole month, because of shipping times.

So stage four is content creation. It involves a ton of aspects like building the website, writing copy for the website, designing the website, doing a photo shoot or video shoot. Photoshoots and video shoots were both product-based and model-based. And I did all of this myself with my props. Another part of content creation was getting testimonials. During my squad retreat to Jamaica, which is my group travel trip, the women who traveled with me were the first to give me feedback on the products. I was able to get video testimonials and reviews for the website from them.

After content creation, I went into stage five, which was launch prep includes many aspects as well. For one, my shipment started to come in December and I started to get tons of boxes. And my room started to look like a warehouse. And I started to pre-package all of the orders. I have one product, which is the Wash Day Kit, which includes all five of these items. It was easy to pre-package everything because every order is the same.

My mom and friend helped me package over 200 Wash Day Kits. Additionally, in launch prep, I had to focus on building my email list and write launch emails so I'm ready for launch day. Prioritize creating an email list. You can't rely on social media to get your word out. Additionally, I worked on my social media feeds. I pre-planned all of my blog posts on the Joiful Bee Instagram account. So it's so much easier to plan for social media when all the content is created. All the copy is written and all you have to do is schedule it. This took hours and hours to write the copy for the social post so I can make sure that they had their brand vision and that they met different points of my customer journey.

And the last phase is just any missing pieces or elements in the process. For example, scheduling YouTube videos and doing live streams with my audience. There's a lot of things that went into this launch. And this was scratching the surface. So those are the five phases that I went through to launch my product. I hope you guys learn something new in this video and appreciate all the hard work that went into launching Joiful Bee this process is way more feasible and easier if you have a team. I don't have a team, so a lot of this was using my expertise in the marketing space, getting mentors, joining courses, and more. Doing advertising, there's so much more but once again, I don't want to keep you guys so long on this video. But if you would like a part two or if you would like other aspects of the launch gone into more detail, let me know in the comments below. I would love to do that for you guys. Be sure you check out Joiful Bee which is launching on Friday and get your perfect wash day tip. And I'll talk to you guys next time. Bye.

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