Indieshopper.com – The Vision
“IndieShopper is a boutique of up-and-coming designers with a little urban grit; Shop Independent is a great place for those who fancy accessories a little off the straight and narrow. In particular, their belts are hipster gear central. Indie Shopper is the hottest designer boutique for today’s freshest fashion designers in the county.” Quote: Style Magazine.
Indieshopper.com – The End
We’re dedicated to finding the hottest emerging fashion designer labels nationwide—no need to travel to Melrose Avenue in L.A. or SoHo in New York. You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking for something original, something hip (and sweatshop-free). This was the guiding principle.
The most surprising artist submission was from SteveO from Jack Ass. At that time JackAss was a considerable rave and SteveO was the movie star. I had to put that his image front and center of the website. That was a good time, but in 2007, when the economy collapsed, so did sales, so I decided to take my innovations to Microsoft.
Black Eyed Peas Band
The most prominent Artist, BuckyJonson, and band members from the BlackEyed Peas agreed upon an exclusive partnership with indieshopper.com. The site featured an exclusive song by Fergie (Vapors). In exchange, Indieshopper.com would build a customer landing page to sell band merch and market to its fan base to validate proof of concept.
The Business Pivot – Jungle Green
The Big Bet – The Black-Eyed Peas band management contacted me, and they wanted to collaborate to sell band merch with independent artists. Up-and-coming bands would have a way to sell merch to Indie Artists. The vision is to build a cross-fusion of independent fashion and street culture for independent designers. The partnership with brands would be to create a co-branded site in exchange for your exclusive online merchandiser. In business mode, I continued to develop strategic partnerships with various music bands and urban clothing vendors.
Marketing: Free Press
Knowing you have product market fit when the site stats start showing traffic without doing any marketing. Free traffic without having to hire a publicist to write editorials. At IndieShoppers’ website peak, it had 2k brands and was cash-positive.
Wired.com (Press Mention) – The best seller was Ray Gun Buckle by “Han Cholo” which was featured in wired.com news article. Business 101- Partner with the best up-and-coming independent brands. My top vendor was Han Cholo the hottest jewelry designer coming out of LA. His jewelry is seen on many A-list celebrities, including his biggest fan, Snoop-Dogg. I sold a lot of Brass-Ring belt buckles.
Indieshopper.com – MVP/GTM
Phase Three: 10/31/05 (Halloween) site went live with only five vendors. 11/15/05: First online sale of BodyRocks necklace! 1/5/06: In a few months, 80 vendors. 3/23/06: Sales hit $10k with 240 vendors. The startup went from Crawl, Walk, to Run in under two years. My goal was to start leveling up the caliber of vendors and streamline the merchant’s internal tool systems. I added a Message Center to communicate with vendors 1:1. Reduced the order fulfillment to 1-3 min to process an online order, including automated emailing PDF shipping labels.
Indieshopper.com e-commerce site (9 months)
Phase Two – I cloned the directory site with over 10k prospective vendors. I hired developers to build all the features needed to complete a full e2e marketplace website. I was on a budget, so all code libraries must use open-source libraries and PHP. I was one of the early adopters using API’s from Woo Commerce, PayPal, USPS, and a custom CMS system. Vendors could register and publish products to the store in 10 minutes. I designed and prototyped the entire site using Image Maps and Dreamweaver to hardcode functioning pages, then published the designs for developers’ review. This is the best method to communicate functionality requirements to offshore developers. This is how InVision started and Figma perfected it.
ShopIndependent.com – Proof of Concept (3 months)
Phase One: The beginning from the sale of a dot com, I decided to build an Ad banner exchange directory to foster vendor relationships and understand the indie market. The goal was to find the hottest independent up-and-coming designers and market to them as a free resource to promote their website. In exchange, they would put a banner on their site for Free or pay to have direct placement. The number of new brands interested validated the POC and helped drive vendor awareness for indieshopper.com. I used all the questionable SEO tricks and cornered the search keyword term “indie” before Google changed its algorithm. At its peak, the site had over 10k referrers and half a million unique visitors. The site generates over $3k monthly from Google AdSense and placed ads.
