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Episode 71 – Becoming Vancouver’s Largest Swimwear Company Selling Strictly on Instagram

Hands up.  

Who out there among you have at some point today, found yourself smartphone in hand, deeply ensconced in the social media rabbit-hole of Instagram? 

Thought so.  

It is almost impossible to overstate the influence that Instagram has on our lives in 2019.  

As ubiquitous as Facebook has become in the last decade, for today’s generation Z, Facebook is pretty much the social media equivalent of a rotary phone with a long, annoyingly knotted cord.  

As eCommerce sellers we are constantly looking to expand and solidify our social proof.  

To put it simply, there really is no better way to do that then with Instagram.  

Today’s guest was born in China then later moved to Vancouver for her University studies.  Originally her desire was to go into chemical engineering and when her grades wouldn’t allow that, she pivoted and went into the University of British Columbia’s renowned forestry department.  

Who would have known that in making that choice, Vancouver’s largest swimwear brand, Vitae Apparel would soon explode on the eCommerce landscape?

On this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Customer Success, Bradley Sutton is speaking with Selene Dior, who now at 21 years of age has spent the last 4 years building a powerful swimwear brand with 99 percent of her sales coming directly from her presence on Instagram.  

Selene had always spent a lot of time in the water and lifeguarded to make a little extra money.  

It was while she was in the middle of her Forestry finals at UBC and knowing from long experience what a young woman’s swimwear should look and feel like, that Selene created a few samples of her swimwear ideas.  

They were so well received that after a hyper-successful initial product launch, she never returned to her University classes.  

According to Selene, it is Instagram’s ability to create a strong brand message, showcase her personality, and help her stand out from the competition that initially drew her to the platform.  

Her customers are typically 18 to 24-year-old females who are very visual buyers. With Instagram’s image-driven model, they have the opportunity to look for women with similar body types to identify swimwear that would look good on their bodies as well.  

But it’s not simply her design sense and desire to empower women with different body types that have helped make her business a success; it’s her ability to monetize Instagram’s unique position on social media that has set her apart.  

Partnering with an ocean clean-up program, she used one free bikini giveaway idea to bring in 17,000 new followers in just two days.  

Selene works hard to keep open the lines of connection with her buyers and followers which, true to 2019 socio/business constructs, are often one and the same.  

She does this by actively engaging with her followers, posting their photos on her own increasingly significant Instagram page, and sourcing legitimate influencers who will resonate with her prospective buyers.  

Now, she’s started an agency to help businesses find their way in a complex eCommerce world and capitalize on her hard-won Instagram knowledge.  

Listen in to the podcast and learn about Selene’s use of Instagram “Stories” and what to make of their new “Shopping” platform. 

In episode 71 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Selene discuss:

  • 02:08 – Chemical Engineer, No – Forestry, No – Swimwear, An Enthusiastic Yes!
  • 03:04 – After a Successful Launch During Finals, She Opted Out of University
  • 03:58 – 99 Percent of Her Brand’s Sales Originate from Instagram
  • 05:38 – Empowering Women with Different Body Types  
  • 06:15 – Why Instagram?
  • 07:20 – Instagram Giveaways 101
  • 09:20 – Free Bikinis Lead to 17,000 Followers in 2 Days  
  • 12:20 – What Were the Logistics of the Giveaway?
  • 13:30 – What’s Her Process for Collaborating with Influencers?
  • 16:38 – Using Giveaways to Broaden Her Brand’s Base
  • 18:12 – Keeping Her Followers Engaged
  • 21:38 – Chasing Instagram’s Algorithm  
  • 23:43 – Using ”Story” Shows People that You are More Active on Instagram
  • 24:16 – How About Some Numbers? 
  • 25:30 – Her Brand’s Price-Point Doesn’t Match Up Well with Amazon
  • 29:22 – How to Reach Out to Selene

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

  • Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
  • Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
  • Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
  • Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
  • SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today’s 21-year-old guest left school just before her university finals to launch a swimwear brand that’s now the largest in Vancouver, and 99% of her sales come from Instagram. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton: How’s it going, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast. This is Bradley Sutton, and this is the show where we give you guys amazing guests who have different backgrounds in e-commerce that will help all of you become serious sellers. And one thing that’s cool is if we want to be a serious seller, it doesn’t mean that we have to sell on Amazon. And I’ve got a perfect example of that today. My guest is Selene Dior who does not sell on Amazon. Selene, how’s it going?

Selene Dior: Good. And you?

Bradley Sutton: Just delightful, thank you. I think I’ve had a couple guests before who didn’t sell on Amazon, but there was still a strong connection, and I heard about you. I’ve never met you in person, but I heard about a speech that you gave at a conference up there in Canada, and it was all about Instagram. And I know that even though you don’t have Amazon experience, you have extensive Instagram experience. Probably, a lot of Amazon sellers would be wise to follow some of the things that you’ve done on Instagram, and it could actually help them in their business. And so, that’s why I wanted to have you on here. Welcome to the show.

Selene Dior: Thank you so much.

Bradley Sutton: All right. Just really briefly though, let’s talk a little bit about your background. You live currently in Canada. Were you raised in Canada?

Selene Dior: No. I was born in China, and I immigrated here when I was younger, but I moved back to China from grade one all the way until grade nine, and then, I graduated high school in Vancouver, and I think I did a term in UBC, and I stopped and started my own business and pretty much stopped going to school.

Bradley Sutton: At what age then did you start your own business?

Selene Dior: 17. I’m 21 right now.

Bradley Sutton: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. What inspired you? I mean you’re going to a university and then all of a sudden, you’re like, “Wait a minute, this just doesn’t seem to be the path for me.” What happened? What was the process there?

Selene Dior: When I was in grade 12, I wanted to be a chemical engineer, and my grades weren’t good enough to be in the engineering department. I got into my second choice, which was forestry, and I swam, and I was lifeguarding pretty much since I was 16. Our brand is a swimwear brand when we started. That’s kind of like how I got my inspiration to design swimwear for people since I pretty much know what fits well, what doesn’t because I’ve been doing it my whole life. And when I was in first year, I did forestry and absolutely hated it; I have no interest in it. When I was in school, I was also contacting manufacturers, going back and forth with the samples. And that was for about three months, and I launched the brand when it was during finals. Then after the launch was really successful, I didn’t really want to go back studying forestry, which I didn’t like. I decided to do lifeguarding and run the brand on the side and then that slowly became my full time.

Bradley Sutton: Fast forward just to give people an idea of how fast you were able to grow that within a few years, I know you’re now the largest swimwear brand in Vancouver, if I’m not mistaken. And you’ve even been featured in Vogue UK, so that’s now. The thing that of course I am interested in knowing, and I’m sure our listeners are, is how Instagram helped you get to this level, because I think you owe a lot of your success to what you were able to accomplish on Instagram. Is that right? Is that one of the major tools that you use to grow your brand?

Selene Dior: Yeah. 99% of our sales are through Instagram.

Bradley Sutton: 99%, wow, that’s crazy. Can you just give us some general, not necessarily pertaining to your business, stats as far as Instagram and Facebook, and why it’s important to really have a specific strategy that you can’t just like, “Hey, let me put my brand on Instagram, and it’s going to do well.”?

Selene Dior: Yeah. I think it’s super important to have a very strong brand message for you and for all of the sellers on Amazon. When I went to the speech, they came to me and was like, “Hey, I want to branch out and do my own brand, be on social media, and really like showcase your personality as a brand.” And I think that’s really, really important on Instagram, because you need to stand out from the rest of your competition. And the only way to do that is to show what’s special about your brand through pictures on Instagram. And for my demographic, it works really well because our customers are 18 to 24 females, and they are really visual buyers. I feel like they need to look at a photo and say, “Hey, I like this bikini or fitness apparel. It looks amazing on this girl. And I kind of look like this girl, same body type. I think I would look amazing in this too.” And our brand message is empowering women with different body types. The girls we’re showcasing on our brand have different body types, which the buyers can resonate with. They feel confident in buying our product after seeing these photos, and our main strategy would be posting tons of user content to posting customers’ photos, posting customer’s photos on a beach traveling.  Tons of customer photos, I think, will give you a lot of social proof on Instagram.

Bradley Sutton: Obviously, there’s a million different kinds of social media these days. Is there a reason why you chose to focus on Instagram as opposed to say Facebook or YouTube or other channels like that?

Selene Dior: Yeah, because three years ago, when we started, Instagram was the social media platform and 90% of our customers are on Instagram. Nowadays, I feel like Facebook is for late twenties to forties. Those people are on Facebook more than they are on Instagram. And for YouTube, we do YouTube too. We give products to influencers on YouTube, and they do a try-on haul, a showcasing haul, apparel fits. And we also link that into our Instagram. I feel like Instagram and YouTube has a strong connection. Back then, growing Instagram was easier and cheaper to grow, I’d say.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Okay, cool. Now, I know one of the methods I was told that you use is called giveaways. Now, for those who are Amazon sellers, we hear the term giveaways. It means one of two things. There’s like this Amazon on-page thing that’s called giveaways. Actually, it’s through Amazon. The other way is when people are launching a brand, they’re doing discounted promotions, but what does quote–unquote giveaways mean in the Instagram world? How do you use Instagram giveaways in order to grow your brand?

Selene Dior: Actually, there’s different types of giveaways I usually run. I try, not too often but enough, to capture my followers’ attention and gain new followers. I did get caught up in doing too many giveaways a year and a half ago, and I find that it wasn’t so effective anymore, because we do it so often people don’t think it as special. But to give you like a big picture of it, there’s a few types of giveaways. One of them is like your own brand. You post on your post and you say like, “Hey, follow us, like this photo, tag a friend, and we’re giving away, let’s just say, five sets of bikinis,” and people usually participate, but it’s a lower engagement rate, because you’re only showing that to your own followers, and you’re only growing that way, hoping that they would tag their friends that are not already following you.

Selene Dior: The second type of giveaway would be to collaborate with another brand or another Instagram influencer. They would have to post on their feed as well, saying like, “Hey, follow this brand and me.” That way, you’re bringing in a lot more new faces and new followers using the other brand or the other influencer’s Instagram platform. And it brings a lot of traffic onto our website too.  On our website, we have email capturing popups, so that way, we use email marketing to retarget as well. Actually we did one three to four months ago; we were giving away free bikinis to everyone that follows us and that reposted the photo on their Instagram story and that’s it. Everyone that does it gets a free bikini, and it went viral. We gained 17,000 followers in two days and then we kept 90% of it.

Bradley Sutton: How many followers, just out of curiosity, do you have in total?

Selene Dior: Right now, I have a hundred K (100k).

Bradley Sutton: And then there’s this one promotion that got you like?

Selene Dior: Really close to a 100k; it was like 90… I got to 96, and then I dropped a bit and then it’s been like three, four months., so we slowly got up to a 100k.

Bradley Sutton: Can you explain it a little bit again? How will that work? What were the components of that two-day push that you guys did?

Selene Dior: Yeah, so we posted an image; on the image, it was a model wearing the bikini that we are giving away for free. And on the picture, it has text saying, follow Vitae Apparel and repost this photo on your story to claim a free bikini. We’ve done it before, but it wasn’t at the scale, and I think a huge component to it was we were also donating to the ocean cleanup. During that time, there was a lot of news talking about ocean conservation and then we wanted to educate our young adults, our audience more about conservation of the ocean and that really added to it, I feel like. Basically, two easy steps: Follow Vitae Apparel and repost it on your story. And I think everybody was just like, “Hey, it’s on my story and it’s only for 24 hours. Might as well try. And if it like is fake, then the story would disappear, or I just delete my story.” For two days to a week, I was on my personal Instagram, and I literally see everybody reposting our story. There was an extra step that they could do, which is to go to the posts on our feed and comment and tag a friend. And we have about 16,000 comments within two days. And then, so to give them a code to redeem this free bikini, we didn’t set it up properly—we live and we learn. We should’ve set it up to like a temporary link in MailChimp and ask the followers to put in their email. Oh, we didn’t do that. We just had four people sitting in there 12 hours a day, DMing every single participant a code to purchase. It was a lot of work for a week and a half. Then there was more work for us to ship like 3000 orders out.

Bradley Sutton: Wow. And these were just regular or discount discounted orders? How many did you actually have to give away only?

Selene Dior: There were about 16,000 people that participated. We messaged out about 16,000 people, but only 3000 of them purchased. But still for every order, what we did was, on Shopify, we bumped up the shipping price. For example, if the order is between zero to $20, we bumped up the shipping price to $25. And the bikini is $0, but you still have to pay the $25 shipping. That being said, a lot of people didn’t participate in the giveaway and they just came on our site and order like normal items. They didn’t even want to claim the free bikini; they just ordered other stuff or they ordered the free bikini plus a lot more other items.  For two days, we made like 3000 sales.

Bradley Sutton: Wow. There were no advertising dollars in there? The only cost to you was the labor of one by one, DMing and packing everybody.

Selene Dior: Yeah. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton: Wow, that’s crazy. You mentioned a little bit before about collaborating with influencers and things. What’s your process? How do you pick what influencers to work with?

Selene Dior: Our girls are usually the blogger type on Instagram; they showcase what they’re wearing, what kind of makeup they’re using. When you’re finding an influencer, you need to find someone that would and that could be your customer. We try to do other things like we go out of our way and find an older audience to be an influencer thinking that,” Hey, we’ll try new things.” But that doesn’t really work with our audience. They just want to see someone they can relate to wearing their stuff, and it needs to be extreme screening nowadays, because a lot of influencers buy likes, buy followers, buy impressions. The number one thing that we always do is we ask them to send us their insights, which Instagram’s business profile provides you with. Their percentage of female and men following, their location, their age, their interests. There’s also another website for that that I use. It’s not a hundred percent accurate, but it is pretty close to the real insight. It’s called hypeauditor.com, and it shows you if their followers are real or not and it’ll tell you. We use that sometimes if we can’t truly judge it just by going through their Instagram and seeing if their followers and likes are real.

Bradley Sutton: That’s a good point. That’s a good point because I can imagine guys being guys; in your niche, there’s maybe some influencers out there, but maybe 80% of their followers are guys because they like seeing women in bikinis or something. An influencer like that might not have the reach that you want because obviously that’s not your target market. That’s interesting. Speaking of business accounts on Instagram, is that the way you’re able to have people reshare a story? Because if it’s a personal account, you can’t really reshare it unless somebody’s tagged, right? I’m kind of newer to Instagram. Can you explain that process a little bit?

Selene Dior: Under a post, there’s three buttons. There’s the like button, which is a heart. Then, there’s a comment button, which is the little comment emoji. And then the third one looks like a paper airplane. That one is the share button; you can share to your friends privately through DM or you can share it on your story if you’re a public account.

Bradley Sutton: That’s from a post, right?

Selene Dior: Yes, that’s from a post. You can share anybody’s post,

Bradley Sutton: Okay. That was what you were saying that people were resharing during that giveaway. Okay. But what about as far as story goes? Are our stories shareable or only when somebody’s tagged?

Selene Dior: Story is shareable too. But when you’re tagged, it pops up in your message. It’s just easier for you to hit a button and post it right away.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. All right. Makes sense. Makes sense. You mentioned that this promotion you did brought you 17,000 followers, but you’ve got more than 80,000 other followers that you grew through other means. What are some of these other means that helped you to get to that many followers?

Selene Dior: A huge part of it is giveaway, running different giveaways. The ones I mentioned before were through my own brand, through collaborations with other influencers or brands.  the other one we did was, I don’t know if you’ve seen it on Instagram, but it’s like you follow a train of people, it basically loops back into the first user. Let’s say, user A follows would lead to user B’s profile. User B would lead to user C; user C would lead to user D; and D goes back to A, so for people to win, let’s say, a trip to Bahamas or $5,000 cash, you need to follow all of these accounts and go back to user A. We did that with huge influencers and huge brands and basically everyone’s followers kind of like transferred to all of the accounts. And with giveaway like that, we usually at least grow five thousand followers. And to be in a giveaway like this, you really need to make sure that the influencer and other brands align with your brand and your customer. We did that a few times, and we gained a lot of followers and just by doing giveaways with other influencers as well.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now, that you have these followers, I mean, like you had said, your retention sounds pretty good, how do you keep people engaged and keep them from unfollowing or make sure that they’re putting eyes on your posts. Do you have a certain formula you use for content?

Selene Dior: For content, we always try to post our customers’ best photos.  I find that works really well because our pages getting bigger and bigger every day, and the girls that are our customers really want to be reposted on a big page like this. They always keep following to see if their photos are getting reposted or if their friends’ photos got reposted; they’re super excited, and they would comment in the post and say like, “Oh this is my best friend.” It’s actually crazy to see that people are super engaged in our page. We also did weekly giveaways where we asked the followers to actively like and comment on our posts that we post every day, and we randomly pick two winners per week to win a gift card to our store.

Selene Dior: That way, we keep them engaged. We also have a private group; it’s a private account.  They’re basically our brand reps, and they post a lot of photos in our bikinis and fitness apparel, and they tag us and then they each get their own discount code and they share with their friends as well. And in that private group, we would launch products internally, and we would give them an exclusive access to new collection or whatnot. And those are 100% our return customers; I’m pretty sure all of them always buys every launch. On Shopify, one month, our return customer rate was 60%.  I think it’s mainly from our private group that we have.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. What do you suggest, still speaking about the followers, about interaction? Do you have a team? Do you follow everybody back? Do you like every single post reply to every post? What are some good rules of thumb that people should do as they start getting more followers, and they get more interaction? What do you do to engage if anything?

Selene Dior: If you go to people that like your posts, a lot of them you don’t follow, but there are loyal customers, loyal followers to you. What I usually do is we have someone doing this like a full-time job, which is to engage back. Even if you don’t follow them, you like some of their posts, you comment on their posts just to let them know that you value them as a customer and a follower, interact with them. And then, I would even sometimes go browse their story and reply to their story and say anything. It could be related to their personal life and a simple comment really makes a huge difference.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. All right. What else can you tell us about Instagram? Because I’m pretty, pretty new to Instagram. I used to, before my Amazon days, be a somewhat social media influencer as far as in the Zumba world. I had the Zumba channel; I had like 20 million views and tens of thousands of followers, but it was all kind of for fun. I never monetized it. I never did anything. It was kind of a cool thing. And then, with Instagram, I’ve never really done anything. I used to put some Zumba videos, but just what are some other kind of rules of thumb as far as either the algorithm; how it works and how to take advantage of it or how to get more engagement? What are some little tips and tricks you can give us?

Selene Dior: Right now, Instagram’s algorithm has been changed a lot recently. They did a huge update. Again, I feel like Instagram is slowly turning and becoming Facebook. They want people to see more of their friends’ and families’ posts rather than a business, so it’s really hard to have your business end up on the explore page. Although Instagram is rolling out with a new feature; it’s called Shop, you can shop and buy directly from Instagram. I think they already rolled it out in the US to just to test it out. We don’t have access to it yet. If you go on your explore page, there’s little tabs on the top and one would you say “Shop” and it’s all the brands that Instagram thinks you’re interested in and then all of the products are there for you to shop, which I think is really cool for business.

Selene Dior: But in terms of organic reach, I would say, really engage with your customers: post more giveaways or content that you know your customers would want to see. Back to the brand message thing, we keep weekly stories to give the followers some context of what we represent. For example, we really promote self-care, self-love, so then every Sunday, we have story series about self-care Sunday. Some tips on how to meditate or how to do your skincare routine, stuff that people would like to read. It’s kind of like a blog post, but on Instagram story. I would also say to really utilize Instagram story because Instagram posts are getting pushed further back now. Like I said, the algorithm makes the business posts not really seeable.

Selene Dior: We really use Instagram story. It shows people that you are more active on Instagram, because when you’re posting, you only post maybe once a day, once a week or twice a week, and Instagram story, it’s like Snapchat and you can post daily or even every hour. You can pose a video of what your team is doing or the behind the scenes of manufacturing. People love to see that.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Now, you’ve been in business for a few years now. How many figures are you doing? What’s your sales yearly? What’s your projected sales this year? All coming from Shopify, right?

Selene Dior: Yeah. All coming from Shopify. We’re doing six figures. I’m trying to hit seven in the next two years. That’s why we are trying to do some Facebook ads, Instagram ads.

Selene Dior: Like I said, right now, we’re like solely organic just from our 100,000 followers and whoever their referral is. We’re really trying to push our brand to different platforms like Pinterest, Snapchat, Facebook just to do ads and see how that is. We’re trying to get more press as well to write about our brand, so that’s some methods we’d be using in the next year.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. How many full-time employees do you have?

Selene Dior: We have four.

Bradley Sutton: Four. Four full-time employees are all that you need to run a six-figure business, and you guys are shipping all of your orders yourselves?

Selene Dior: Yeah. We are just doing a huge sale and then everybody is helping to pack, like everyone.

Bradley Sutton: Nice. Nice. Any thoughts about expanding to Amazon at all?

Selene Dior: I thought about it, but our price point is not the best for selling on Amazon. I feel like the bikinis that are going for on Amazon are like 20 bucks, and our retail price is $80.

Bradley Sutton: Oh wow.

Selene Dior: Yeah. I feel like it’s different. Maybe if we start another brand, we might do it on Amazon, but I feel like if I use our brand name to put on Amazon, we’re not there yet. We can’t do that because of the price point. That’s what I feel.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Well one thing you could think about too is as you start getting more brand recognition, which you already have a lot of, there’s a lot of people, who in my experience, I used to work for a big diet pill company, and they were all over TV and they’re in Walmart and everything, but there’s just a big portion of, not a big portion, a decent-sized portion of the population who they don’t want to buy from a TV ad; they don’t want to buy from Walmart. They’re just like, “Hey, I got my Prime delivery. I want to have it in one day or two days,” and they’re actually willing to pay even more. They don’t care about the reviews; they don’t care about anything. As you grow your brand, hit me up once you’re ready to do Amazon because I think there might be a market for you who have already built a brand recognition just for the people who prefer to order from Amazon as opposed to Shopify. That’s cool because nowadays, a lot of people think that, “Hey, if you want to grow a six-figure business or one that’s almost seven figures, you almost have to be on Amazon. But you’re a perfect example of somebody who has not done one sale on Amazon, other than maybe your old textbooks when you dropped out of university, but if you have not done one regular sale on Amazon and still get to six or seven figures exclusively leveraging social media, I think that is so cool. You mentioned some of your goals, but what are some of your other short-term and long-term goals, either with the brand or just e-commerce in general?

Selene Dior: Well, right now, we’re actually running an agency as well to help other businesses that don’t know how to run their brands on social media. To take their brand to Instagram and really build a brand message and a loyal following. That’s something we’re working on right now. We’re helping a few brands to do that. They actually sell a lot on Amazon as well. And they’re the ones that came up to me during the speech and were like, “Hey, I really want to build a brand like yours. How can I do that?” Right now, we’re doing that, and I really want to grow that because I think not everyone knows how to build a brand on social media, and I feel like it’s not something—if you have the time, like I did when I started, then you can make mistakes, learn—if you already have a business going on Amazon, and you don’t really have the time to take time off what really works. Find someone that knows how to do it. That’s one of our bigger goals; to help more brands build their brand message on Instagram. We tried to do wholesale. We were in a few meetings with different stores to do wholesale, but we’re not 100% sold on the idea yet just because you don’t know how the swim boutique or the store will handle your brand. When you walk into a store, when you buy something, you’re not buying it because of their brand story or their story behind it. You’re buying it because it looks good or it feels nice, so we’re not really sure if we’re going to do wholesale yet, just because we don’t know how other people would present our brand to their customers.

Bradley Sutton: Okay.

Selene Dior: Yeah, that’s something we’re thinking about.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. All right, that sounds good. Now, I actually didn’t know about that agency you’re starting. I’m sure a lot of our listeners might be interested in that. If they want to find out if they want to reach you directly to get some help with their Instagram branding, how can they reach you?

Selene Dior: They can email me personally at DIOR@vitaeapparel.com.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. What’s your website or Instagram for the business Instagram.

Selene Dior: Our business Instagram is not really up and running. All our customers right now are through referral.

Bradley Sutton: No, no, for your apparel.  I’m sure a lot of people are interested to see how you interact with them.

Selene Dior: Yeah, it’s VITAE Apparel. And our website is vitaeapparel.com

Bradley Sutton: All right. Well, Selene, thank you so much for coming on here with us. We haven’t really had someone with your expertise level on Instagram. I think it’s very interesting of how even somebody who’s 17, 18 years old within three, four years was able to build a six-figure business exclusively on social media and not only just on social media but on only one platform. That’s very interesting. And then so, we have five-, six-, seven-, eight-figure sellers out there on Amazon. I think people can understand the potential of if you can go from scratch to what you have just on Instagram, what if somebody actually has an Amazon business, already has some brand awareness and now they’re going to start Instagram, I think people can understand that there’s a lot of potential. I thank you for joining us, and I’d love to reach out to you maybe next year and let’s see how you’ve accomplished some of these goals that you’ve set. And who knows, maybe you’ll have an Amazon business by next year. All right, thanks a lot Selene.

Bradley Sutton: Quick note, guys, don’t forget that regardless where you are listening to this podcast, whether it’s on your iPhone or on Stitcher, on Spotify, that you hit the subscribe button so you can be notified every time we drop a new episode.

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Published in: Serious Sellers Podcast

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