Thanks for the inspiration from the instagram marketing thread, my gf had started hers about 6 months ago in the girls stationary niche category. She is at 10400 followers with good response/likes numbers. She now wants go branch into actually monetizing it, by offering physical products. The issues we're facing -
1. We are in Spain, over half of her fans are in US. (hence, shipping there from here is out of the question)
2. We don't have $1000+ spare to buy product
3. We haven't reached out and asked what actually sells from other competitors. My gf is young an new to business, so of course she thinks a coffee mug with a cool design will sell, but I am more afraid of it not being the case. I was suggestion she asks her fans what items they will actually want and vote. There are other instagram pages will less followers who have stores and actually have physical stores, and gf asks how they do it, and I just say probably money from something else invested.
What I've thought is 1 - she can offer product through companies that make the stuff themselves and ship it (there are t-shirt/cups companies that do this). This would eliminate the shipping problem.
2. She can offer products that don't need to be shipped - desktop wallpapers, iphone wallpapers, but what else that people would pay for?
3. We can figure out a way to dropship from the factory itself - but I think talking to China will need at least ???? $2000? to start?
So gf is very excited about this, but I am not very much. She wants to make unique stationary items in a certain category, but what can we do to test the market without spending up front?
1. We are in Spain, over half of her fans are in US. (hence, shipping there from here is out of the question)
2. We don't have $1000+ spare to buy product
3. We haven't reached out and asked what actually sells from other competitors. My gf is young an new to business, so of course she thinks a coffee mug with a cool design will sell, but I am more afraid of it not being the case. I was suggestion she asks her fans what items they will actually want and vote. There are other instagram pages will less followers who have stores and actually have physical stores, and gf asks how they do it, and I just say probably money from something else invested.
What I've thought is 1 - she can offer product through companies that make the stuff themselves and ship it (there are t-shirt/cups companies that do this). This would eliminate the shipping problem.
2. She can offer products that don't need to be shipped - desktop wallpapers, iphone wallpapers, but what else that people would pay for?
3. We can figure out a way to dropship from the factory itself - but I think talking to China will need at least ???? $2000? to start?
So gf is very excited about this, but I am not very much. She wants to make unique stationary items in a certain category, but what can we do to test the market without spending up front?
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