Manji : My first business

Before I start getting into Manji, I must explicitly state that my friend and I ran this business together. If it were not for him, I probably would not have had the courage to actually begin. For a better experience reading this post, read my post on "Why I started a business at 14" first!

The creation and naming of Manji

My partner and I decided that the first step in creating this business would be naming it. This process took unnecessarily longer than I thought it would, but it was very exciting. It was my partner that thought of the name Manji and I went with it. The name was important because it was the face of our company - the first thing the customer sees before they buy our product. To accompany our name, we needed to create the logo. I, a terrible artist with a poor taste in design, decided to take up this challenge as I thought the experience would be valuable. After hours of youtubing, "How to create a logo" and checking out free logo creation websites, I decided to go for a minimalistic high contrasting logo - in other words, a black and white simple logo.

I judged that it was simple and yet and interesting. I incorporated the idea that light coloured text on a dark background is more visually capturing than dark coloured text on light backgrounds. I took inspiration from a few fortune 500 companies like apple and hp and noticed that all logos have similar attributes including simplicity and appeal. The image above is the best I could have done with my past knowledge and paint 3D ( a Microsoft software )

Taking advantage of the national craze

After designing the logo and establishing our brand, we had to decide on a product. The obvious choice was to choose a product that was in high demand, making them easier to sell. Thankfully, my partner and I started this business venture in the mist of the fidget spinner craze. He had one, I had one and so did I and we were convinced this was a good idea. However, looking back now, it was not ( more on that towards the end ). We conducted "product research" and all we really did was consider our personal observation, which is highly empirical and unreliable. Finally, I looked up fidget spinners on Ali express, where we took advantage of economies of scale and bought in bulk for lower prices. Hence, the total cost for each spinner would be the cost itself + (shipping cost / number of spinners). We found the cost for each spinner to be around $3 and these spinners were being sold for around $10. You could imagine the look on our faces when we realised, we could sell the spinners for $7 dollars profit per unit! I was thinking, "if we sell 100 units, we will make $700" and the anticipation of profits started growing and all this time, I was not taking into account of my lack of experience in marketing, which is vital when it comes to running a business.

Understanding the law

As young teenagers, we knew our knowledge regarding businesses and law was minimal and so to prevent accidentally doing anything illegal, we did hundreds of google searches ( still wasn't sure if the sites were reliable ) and ran into business taxes. However, in Singapore, taxes were only applicable to businesses earning profits over $1000 and to avoid this, we prevented ourselves from buying over 142 units. ( keeping the profits < $1000 ).

Researching platforms to market

A few weeks after the investment, the inventory reached my partner’s home. Now, we finally come to marketing - a vital aspect of business that I dislike to this day. We had to decide the channels in which we wanted to sell our product and the following few were what we decided.

1. Friends and family

2. Carousel ( local selling app )

3. Local shop vendors

4. Door to door selling

The list above is in order of most likely to least. We expected to make the most money from friends and family because, being our humble selves, we thought they would "give us a change because we were so young" and buy a few for our sakes. We were very wrong. None of our family members purchased them and maybe only 1 or 2 friends bought from us. We were too scared to approach local shop vendors ( as it was out of our comfort zones ) and also, we would receive less profits from local vendors because in order for them to make profit, they will need to buy them lower than retail cost, reducing our profit margin. Lastly, door to door selling required a licence and so that was unavailable. Hence, we had to settle on carousel sales. Carousel is a Singapore based selling app which allows users to take pictures of the product, set a price and sell! Since it is an online based platform, our branding was more important than ever.

Actual marketing of product

First matter of business was to take stunning images and videos of our spinners and we had no professional equipment. So, we took our cameras and snapped a few pics with poor lighting at different angles and positioning. Thinking back, some simple photo editing like editing the hue, saturation and luminosity would have made a huge difference in the quality of our images and videos. The phrase "first impression counts" fit nicely here, and these images were the first thing that carousel users see when they visit our page and if they judge them unprofessional, we will lose business. Considering that we had relatively older generation phones and my basic skill in video editing ( at the time ), we did a decent job. Sometimes I wonder if I rushed the process in the anticipation of money because there was always something that I could have improved. However, I knew that having the perfectionism attitude will eventually do more harm than good. So, we settle with the quality of work we had done and listed the product. We did not invest in advertising using google or Facebook because we simply did not know how to at the time and also because the idea did not come up at the time.

End result and why we stopped

Time passed and we made a decent number of sales, making a net profit of around $ 50. Wait a second, I thought you were anticipating $700 in profit? Well, that was if we actually sold all the units and that thought did not cross my mind. I do not have the exact numbers of my investment, revenue etc. We stopped because that was when my family decided that I needed to better my grades and sent me to a boarding school in India. Naturally, I did not force my partner to continue the business and I let him keep the profits because I value the journey more than I did the destination (which was 25 bucks). Additionally, the business model was based on the popularity of one product and the demand of which was declining - rapidly, which was one of the reasons we couldn't sell all the units. It was a sad felt moment when we had to close Manji, but this experience gave me the aspiration to start another soon ( and I did )

My experience and regrets?

So, after all this, did I regret anything? Absolutely not. I cherish each moment and each decision I had to make with my partner regarding manji and also as mentioned before, starting this business gave me the enough knowledge and courage to start another. I learn how important different aspects of a business and how much time to allocate for each. For example, more time should be spent on product research than marketing. I also now know that since I did not conduct proper market research, we were not aware that fidget spinner trend was already declining before we chose that product and because of that, we should not have chosen spinners because despite the high demand, there was also a high supply, meaning the market was already very saturated and prices were very competitive. One thing I did regret was not proactively trying to exit our comfort zones. Doing so might have found us one local vendor who might have bought our spinners or even at least give us the courage to try out different ideas like diversification

Overall, if you are young ... No. Regardless of your age, you should try doing some sort of business and to make the whole experience less scary, do it with a friend like I did. There will be more skills and work hours that are disposable with more people. It is very important to understand that you should embrace every part of it, nevertheless of making a profit, loss or just breaking even. Doing so will also allow you to share it as a cool story ( like I am doing right now ). If you are thinking about starting a business but having some sort of issue, you could always leave a comment, or even email me, and I will be more than happy to help you out!