#awinewith Yesha Patel
MEET Yesha
Yesha is the founder of after, Find Yesha here:
Transcript
Yesha Patel (00:06):
To be completely honest, we haven't spent any money on marketing. That's
Danielle Lewis (00:11):
Good.
Yesha Patel (00:12):
Yeah. I mean it's great. Yeah, so I wouldn't be able to tell, oh, SEOs and these things and keywords, those things work. I'm not sure. We do come up on Google somehow, but I think for us it was a lot of word of mouth and Facebook groups because we found that our customer groups are mums and busy mums. So I got onto a lot of Facebook groups and I just started posting on there like, Hey, we're doing collections this weekend. Anyone got clothes, book a collection? And I think it became a word of mouth from there and word of mouth was very powerful. Obviously it's the cheapest way for marketing, but it's also very powerful. And so I think a lot of our customers came from there and out through our Instagram and we're trying to educate people. That's a big part of what we're trying to do as well, is we should actually be the last place for your clothes to come to. We shouldn't have to exist, and we will and we do, but your clothes, we want people to be able to make their clothing last a lot longer. And I personally learned a lot of things from just the way that you wash your clothes, that makes a big difference, how you store the type of material that you buy, those kinds of things. So we are really trying to educate our customers and our community of the best ways to take care of their clothing so it doesn't come to us.
Danielle Lewis (01:38):
That's so cool. I love that. You are right. There's different parts of the problem. And I think as business owners oftentimes we kind of just focus in on why we're the solution and why we should be the thing that the go-to. But I really love that you're actually, if this is bigger than business, if you are trying to create an impact, you do have to educate people about the entire supply chain and also the actions they can take. Yeah, I love that. I think that's really cool.
Yesha Patel (02:11):
Thank you. Yeah. And also just we sometimes get the odd like, oh, I don't like how you send it overseas. And I initially was like that first, because again, I didn't know that we don't have much infrastructure on shore, so that's another educational piece as to like, yeah, we don't have things on shore to take care of the waste. Eventually there will be bans for textile waste, but then what do we do if we can't export it and we can't handle it on shore? It's going to be a bit of a soft plastics problem that's currently going on. So again, there's educational piece to it and we're trying to start somewhere. It's really hard being sustainable and trying to do the right thing whilst growing a business at the same time, because we're not perfect and we're not going to be perfect. And my co-founder and I recently just realized that we're striving for perfection a bit too much, and it's making things a lot slower for us. So we are like, Hey, let's just start somewhere. It won't be perfect, but we're doing something and we just go from there.
Danielle Lewis (03:20):
That's awesome. That's such a good lesson in business because nothing's ever perfect. And even if you think you have it perfect, one of your customers will hate it.
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