4 minute read
Taking our teaware business online
Member Profile
Taking our teaware business online
In this article, we hear from AGHA Member and owner of J Style, Jen Idosaka, as she shares her experience of how online sales opportunities have supported J Style to continue business during a global pandemic.
In the early stages of the pandemic in March we thought business was over. We had zero orders for two weeks and the exchange rate was dropping in a way that gave us GFC flashbacks. The students we normally employ had gone home to Japan for the university holidays, and they didn’t come back. A container of stock arrived and we had no-one to help unpack it and no-one to sell it to. All of our stockists were suddenly closed and understandably a little nervous about ordering. J Style is a small family run business. We’ve been importing ceramics and giftware from Japan for over 20 years. We live and work in the semi-industrial end of Wollongong. We can see the flames from the steel works at night, but we’re also just two blocks from the beach and golf course. Down our end of town it’s not unusual to live above a warehouse and have a forklift in your backyard. Neighbours call in to borrow our pallet jack, not a cup of sugar. We can work through any lockdown without leaving the building and we’ve invested in a strong wholesale website and online advertising that has already shown good results. Being small and flexible and with the setup we have, we are in a good position to ride out a pandemic.
But if our stockists don’t get through it, neither do we.
A few wholesalers in our industry seem to be trying their hand at online retailing. That’s not what we want to do. We’re good at importing, dealing with suppliers in Japan and supporting our stockists in Australia and New Zealand. Our stockists excel at retailing and dealing directly with customers.
Besides cancelling our buying trips to Japan this year, the hardest thing about the lockdowns is not meeting face to face with our stockists in their stores or at trade fairs. It’s been really difficult to plan our orders for the next 12 months without the usual feedback.
But it’s not too dire. I’m always up for a chat on the phone, and we have Instagram. I’ve loved seeing how many stockists are really getting into their social media and allowing me to see their stores and displays almost as if I was visiting. It’s great to see how J Style product can be worked in with product from other suppliers to come up with a look that perfectly suits their store and their own customer base. That mix is important and another reason why we don’t sell direct ourselves.
Through April I spent a lot of time working with other people’s web developers. The biggest hurdle to setting up a website is getting all the content together. If I can help my stockists set up online quickly by providing photographs and descriptions, J Style product will be featured well in their online stores.
With no Gift Fair in August, online is all we’ve got to promote our products for the foreseeable future. AGHA has been great with setting up the Online Supplier Showcase and publishing the Industry Catalogue online very quickly.
It’s given all of us who would usually exhibit at their trade fairs, somewhere we can promote our products collectively online. It’s also great for retailers so they don’t have to rely on random internet searches, but can go to one spot on the web and find all the wholesalers they would have been visiting in Melbourne.
All this extra online promotion means we need more product photography than ever. At the same time, I can’t easily travel to Sydney to do a photo shoot. Instead I’ve finally got around to decluttering my office. I’ve reduced so much paper I got rid of two filing cabinets and set up a photo studio in the corner instead. I’m still on a steep learning curve, but I’m quite enjoying upskilling into my new role as product photographer. It’s been a fun part of our business changes and I’ve been swapping tips on lighting and lenses and flat lay backgrounds with my stockists who are all doing a lot more photography in house too.
I ordered a whole variety of leaf teas online from a few of our stockists that are tea shops. I thought I’d use the downtime to film myself making tea in J Style teapots and point customers in their direction. As it turns out, people turned to tea without any help from me. Orders started flooding in for teapots and tea sets and I had to abandon plans to make videos and concentrate on filling orders. At least I have a lot of delicious tea now to keep me going.
Shout out to The Berry Tea Shop theberryteashop.com.au, Tea Leaves tealeaves.com.au and World Par-Tea worldpartea.com.au for supplying me with leaf teas that get me going every morning and keep me going through the afternoon. I’ve got a cup of South Coast Breakfast on my desk right now. I can’t wait to see you and all the other retailers at the AGHA Gift Fair again sooner rather than later.
See the full range of J Style’s Japanese ceramics and giftware at
jstyle.com.au
VIEW ONLINE SUPPLIER SHOWCASE
