 Hello everyone, everyone having a good time? Yes. Is someone here already running a web shop? That's not a lot of people. But really running it or building a web shop for someone else? Building and maintaining. Building and maintaining. I'm going to introduce myself a little bit. I'm Tom. I'm like a web developer for my main profession. I worked for a few big brands. I've seen a few ex-colleagues in the room here already. And nowadays I'm working for Miele for their new web shop. But last year I got a bit fed up of working for clients and always having to do what they wanted to do. And there was also a coincidence with an old friend of mine where we were organizing an event where we also wanted to make funny t-shirts. It didn't happen because there was not a lot of time but afterwards we said we should really do that. And instead of building someone else's brand we put our heads together and we built our own brand and started putting down ideas for funny t-shirts. It's not the most original idea, I know. But we had a lot of fun with it. And then we wanted to really manufacture them and create them, sell them. And I had the technical ability to design everything. I had some people I knew from the past where I ordered t-shirts already. We looked through catalogs. We looked through all kinds of fabrics and ideas and which idea we should print first and what should our target audience be. All that kind of stuff. What would it be called? What would be the future of the whole thing? So we put down a sort of a mission statement. We wanted to do high quality t-shirts. We wanted to be funny. That would be hyper-local. We would use dialects in the t-shirts and stuff like that. And the whole tone of voice was really a bit silly. That was the whole idea. Then the city we live in got word of it and they put out an order of 250 pieces at once. So that was nice. It's nice to have a sort of starting budget. But then we had to get the word out and instead of working the other brands, we built this brand. Bit vintage, bit rock and roll, would be t-shirts you would wear to a festival or just to make fun. You have to get a word, you have to get your word out. So you have to have a consistent brand, a coherent brand, that means fonts, colors, stuff like that, and also your social channels. When you're thinking of a name, don't forget to check all the social media if that brand name has already been taken because it would be really stupid that your Twitter handle or your Facebook handle and your Instagram handle, that they would all be different for instance or they would not be available. We got very lucky that the word doesn't... It means something, but it doesn't need to mean something and people are really intrigued with the .es TLD. But it's just... Because Sazis, we thought it sounded cool and it sounds cool. So that was the whole idea behind the name plus. It was available. Sazis.com was available. Sazis.be was available. Which made it even a bit shorter. For the rest, we communicate in Dutch, but we don't have to if we don't want to. We can always switch to English. So then we had to create a sort of a buzz to get eyeballs on those social accounts. There are numerous people also in the business of running a webshop or the manufacturer of the shirts all set. Like your eyeballs is your potential. That's what Buzz also mentioned in his talk. They have to get to know you. They have to like you before they have trust in you to buy something from you. I already mentioned it's not really a technical talk like I did in the past. There are numerous ways to build your shop. You have the simple ready-made stuff like Shopify. You have the self-hosted stuff. Because of my background, I chose the self-hosted option. Also because I noticed that a lot of people I work with or talk with always ask me to build a lot of shops and I didn't know who commerce is that good. So I thought this is an excellent idea to get to know it much more in depth. I underestimated a few things. Like putting in all the different shirts, all the different variations, the colors, the sizes. Also how many sizes do you have to order for each? You can also choose a drop ship option where you just manufacture one t-shirt every time one gets ordered. But there's not a lot of margin for yourself in that regard and you don't get to choose the kind of t-shirts you want to print on, stuff like that. I would suggest WooCommerce with a few plugins which really make it really easy to do it. I also advise you to put in the SKUs for each product, for each variation. So that means this sweater for female, for men, in a different size, in a different color. That means a lot of SKUs, certainly because this was not the only sweater. But I cursed very hard when first orders came in and I didn't have the SKUs set up already. Also for your pricing, you can check your competition and I know everyone wants to stand out and have a nice packaging and stuff like that. But keep in mind it costs a lot. It's also a tip I got from one of my friends who is running a bigger workshop, like Count Everything. Make sure that's been paid for. A bit about technology. Actually, if you look at this poster, I think I'm using Yoast, I'm using WooCommerce, I'm using Combo and I'm using Molly for the payment. And if you get that set up, so I'm sponsoring you guys now a little bit back. It's really doable. But think about all the time. Don't calculate or don't pay yourself an hourly rate because you won't earn something the first five years I've been told. For me, it was like a hobby, extra income, yes. But it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of motivation and clients do the weirdest things. Like my daughter came back from school with money, your dad knows what it's for and I don't know anything what it's for because they have a hard time ordering online so they try to bypass that, try to avoid all that kind of stuff. We also had a pop-up store, which was not really our pop-up store, which was the client, the city, selling those 250 t-shirts. They started switching them around. A lot of things you don't think about upfront, but will happen anyway, so that got a lot of confusion. And also, when you're delivering yourself, I'm going to make that my final note, when people are not at home, leave a note. Don't put a bag to their back door. Dogs like t-shirts very much. Okay, if you have any questions, set me up later. For me, it was a nice experiment, I learned a lot about it. I had just a few minutes, but if you want to talk later, I'm available.