Success Story: Kimberley Pereira from My Luxe Beauty

Kimberley Pereira is the founder of My Luxe Beauty, which specialises in natural and organic products for highly textured hair.  A relatively new online seller, Kimberley has a lot of great advice to share about how to start selling online and the benefits of creating a social media community around your brand.

How long have you been selling online and why did you start?

We launched on the 1st of January this year, so the business is fairly new. I was really interested in natural products and I had a passion for testing new things for my hair. I was trying lots of products to do certain styles and using YouTube to research things, and I found that I couldn’t get a lot of the products that I wanted in the UK. So, I just thought that if I’m looking for these products, then other people probably are as well. It was always going to be an online shop because the overheads are a lot less. We’ve started small but we’re doing well, and maybe one day we will have a physical store, but for now selling online is going great.

What have been your biggest challenges selling online, and how have you overcome them?

Initially, I found it very hard to have different channels, we sell on eBay, Amazon and my own shop and it was a bit all over the place. Every day I would have to go into each different platform, it really wasn’t very organised, and Zenstores solved that problem.

Finding enough time to do everything, printing different labels from each platform was really difficult, then I found Zenstores. The way it all syncs in together and I’m able to go into Zenstore and all my orders are there, it’s great.

What are your top recommendations for people starting out selling online?

I would say that other people's recommendations are really important - read online reviews of products you’re thinking of using, and take advice from other people that are running online stores. I jumped into a lot of things without researching them properly in the beginning. I was sold a lot of products that didn’t work for me, and I wish I had done a bit more research.

How do you promote your shop?

We use social media quite a lot and really engage with people; we’re on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And, we don’t just ‘have an instagram’, we really use it and engage with our followers and our customers. We do also use more ‘traditional’ online advertising, we’ve used Google Ads and Facebook Ads. A lot of it though is our customers sharing with other people - sharing their purchases on social media. People will buy things that others have recommended to them, if your friend posts on social media about a product then you’re much more likely to give it a try.

Why do you use Zenstores?

It’s saved me a lot of time, and made the business more organised. It also makes my packaging look more professional, the printed labels all look the same, and it just makes the parcels look a bit better.

My brother helps me out sometimes, and with Zenstores it was really easy for me to show him how to find the orders and print labels, rather than having to show him how to log in to each platform and the different methods for printing labels on each one. The customer service with Zenstores is great as well.