This inspiring story is of a rising startup called Vivalatina Jewelry started by Nicolas Tranchant in the e-commerce industry to provide personalized advice for online jewelry hoppers and to provide custom-made jewelry services. Here is the story of Vivalatina Jewelry in Nicolas’ own words.
It is exactly the same as going to a jeweler’s workshop, except that we dematerialize the shop, using CAO modeling and digital rendering. At Vivalatina Jewelry, we discuss with our clients and model their jewelry design without the need for our clients to move into our shop or visit several jewelers.
Introduce us to the idea of Vivalatina Jewelry
The concept is to make a jewelry workshop available online at any time worldwide. The client can get in touch with us at any time to ask for more information. It’s pretty much online jewelry focused on the clients’ needs rather than selling generic products.
Our main focus is that our leads get a personalized response from our team about our products or their own jewelry design they want us to make. This seems trivial but is very rare on the web. Especially in the jewelry market where most products available online are standardized and are being sold by big brands.
Time management is also one of our key propositions. As soon as our client gets in touch with us, our client can expect a response with a quote in 12 hours without bothering to go downtown and lose time. This time-saving process is very important for our busy clients that are always on the move for business. They have no time to go to a specific jewelry workshop. Being flexible and being able to manage complex jewelry projects from overseas is the perfect solution for those with jewelry design ideas but have no time to do the physical work involved.
What’s your strategy story? What led you to start Vivalatina Jewelry?
My why is not a solution to a problem but LOVE.
Back in 2008, my Mexican girlfriend came to live with me in France. She is a doctor who graduated in Mexico and had no legal authorization to work as a doctor in France. Hence we tried to sell Mexican silver jewelry online in France, so she could make a living with her own business.
This seemed to us an easy solution back then. After 4 years in France, she was fed up with not being able to work as a doctor. And our online business was also failing as I had my own full-time job and online sales were not my wife’s interest. So she decided to go back to Mexico.
So in 2012, I quit my job and decided to move to Mexico with my wife, who could work as a doctor there. And I decided to focus 100% on this jewelry business idea to sell Mexican silver jewelry in France, shipped from Mexico this time.
Needless to say that my beginnings were pretty hard, as I knew nothing about the web, eCommerce, or marketing. After failing 3 years in a row with little success, I shaped my business around gold and diamond jewelry and custom-made jewelry service. The business has been growing since I made these changes. The future seems bright now because I decided to quit everything to follow my love. I am proud of that.
What marketing, operation strategies are you adopting at Vivalatina Jewelry?
I focus all my marketing efforts on Search Engine Optimization.
As I was failing to generate traffic to my online boutique back in 2012 and 2013, I decided to learn SEO from blogs, tutorials, webinars, and books. I started noticing improvements by the end of 2013. I tried even harder to move the needle. As a result, I was able to generate 55,000 unique visitors each month now in 2020.
I decided to learn and manage online marketing myself but I knew nothing about it at the beginning. I was unable to choose a marketing company and did not have the budget for that either.
Since then, I had a lot of work to do to set up my own workshop and manage the clients. hence I decided to stick to my SEO focused strategy as I was already efficient with this marketing channel.
Now that I have grown my traffic and leads through our French online boutique, I aim at reproducing this for our US online boutique using the services of PR company JustReachOut. In September 2020, I also launched our Instagram account to diversify our marketing channel, but SEO will still be our main focus at least till 2022 to grow our business in the US.
Any strategy mistakes you have made and what did you learn?
My biggest mistake was to start this business journey with no knowledge and seeing the goal as trivial. It was not trivial at all.
I should have focused on learning and teaching myself since day one or let’s say even before.
Knowledge is power. Power to think better, to be more efficient, and to grow a business and create jobs.
Learning in marketing and business through books or webinars is my main agenda now to make sure that I drive my business the way I want.
Finally what advice do you have for your fellow entrepreneur readers?
Learn to fail, accept it and learn from it is the best way to meet success.
When I look back at 8 years of my business journey, every good move or clever decision I made for my business today came from a failure of my operations or a big obstacle that was putting my business in jeopardy. And certainly not because I was good at avoiding failure.
Being able to accept the challenge and transform my services have been the growth levers to grow my business.
Disclaimer: The information in the above story is provided by the startup and The Strategy Story takes no responsibility for the authenticity of the product and services offered by the startup. Reader’s discretion is advised.
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