5 minutes of eComm Wisdom: Ashley from Mohala

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Yes, I did a big site upgrade that I did with Alejandro, who I found through Storetasker. And the struggle I have is

I'm making a product that's new on the market that people don't really understand:

it's custom fitting eyewear. It's 3 different nose ridge sizes. Based on someone's face shape: they wear a different size.

You know, no one is asked what size eyewear do you wear? So there's this education piece that we were struggling with on on our website and what I was comparing against were like huge global brands that have quite a fancy, robust website, that I wanted to recreate basically.

And have a way that you could go through and be educated on your nose bridge and also select all of the different features that we offer, including lenses and there's a lot of other customer selections. And so it was not easy and I feel like people were saying "this can't be done", or, you know, we were running into a lot of roadblocks.

But Alejandro, along with an app called Lens Advisors teamed up, and as a team, the 3 of us figured out how to build this.

I mean, I feel like it looks really similar to what like billion dollar eyewear companies have as their checkout process. And I think it's such an improved customer experience and we're better educating how our product works, how it functions.

I feel like I'm more able to be there with the customer at the website teaching them as I would if I was on the floor in Nordstrom, teaching someone what their perfect fit is.

And our reach checkout metric increased 54% after we implemented that.

So, yeah, I'm really happy with that. And, and that was thanks to Storetasker and Alejandro.

One thing I did in the past, early on, and I have mixed feelings about it, is a blog.

And the good thing about the blog was very early on I was able to connect with a lot of other founders which ended up being a good network that has benefited me, but the blog took a lot of time: I would have to transcribe the blog and then edit it.

And I think my lesson learned was I wasn't getting an ROI on that. It was like a fun thing to do. There were some good connections, but it wasn't driving our sales.

So I think, you know, being conscious with things like that and making sure if you're doing an initiative, think about how is this generating in an immediate ROI, especially if it's a huge time suck.

Yeah, easy: Hire third party inspection companies to inspect every order. I did that from day 1 and that has caught numerous issues.

If the factory knows it's going to be inspected, that makes them way more intense about the order and making sure it's done right. I use QIMA. And basically, they go to the factory. You can schedule it mid production, at the beginning, I do it at the end, But once everything's done, they go in and they spend a one man or woman day, inspecting all the products.

And they've caught, like, one time, all the polarized axis were off axis. And so we had to redo all of the sunglasses. And so I've also added a lab inspection where we also send a frame to the lab and make sure that the axis is correct because that affects the polarization of the lens.

But I think if you're not going to be there and if quality is really important to you, I think third part inspection is huge.

And then the other thing I've done is, when COVID happened and I couldn't fly and visit my factory, I hired, a person who lives near my factories and, is well versed in supply chain management and she's like my liaison to the factory. And she also goes in person. She also checks production throughout the process.

And she communicates with them, actually more than I do now. For me, so far, it's been really good and her English is better than my factory's English, so I think that also really helps and has helped ensure good relationships with the factory and also good quality and on time delivery.

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