Customer Story: Mark from Hunnyboots

Welcome Mark! So what’s the story behind Hunnyboots? 

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I've always had dogs my whole life. From a child right up into my retirement age. 

But this time around we got a rescue Greyhound which is a breed I was unfamiliar with. I adopted ‘Hunny’ when she was 5 years old. She was an absolute delight, but within 2-3 weeks of having her in an urban environment - we noticed she was limping a lot. 

I took Hunny to the vet and learned she had grown a corn in her foot. That’s when I found that Greyhounds are naturally prone to grow corns. There are operations, but the best thing you can do for a Greyhound is to put boots on their feet. 

That’s when I embarked on a 6 month journey, trolling through Etsy & Amazon to find boots. I purchased maybe 30 pairs of boots and tore them apart to create a perfect boot for Hunny. Eventually - when I showed my prototype to my vet who specialized in Greyhounds - she was amazed. She told me there’s a big market opportunity for other Greyhound owners . 

So in August 2018 - I finalized the designs for a small batch of 500 pairs in varying sizes. And set out to sell them online. 

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Fascinating- and how did you get started selling online, how did it go?  

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I asked my son, a digital guru, about the best platform to use for creating a digital store. He suggested Shopify and I was intrigued to learn more about it. Within just a few days, I had a basic free version of the shop built.

After a week, I quickly realized I needed more, I found the Archetype theme that I wanted and it answered most of the things I looked for, especially because I had a big story to tell. I genuinely loved, and still love the theme that I'm using.

It's very graphically oriented & the control over imagery, size & depth is super easy to use,  you don't need to be in any way, shape or form a developer to do it. Within a week, my site was up and running, and after 30 seconds of it being live I got a sale!

Oh, and the other part is the Archetype support team is phenomenal. It's quite easy for me to pose a question and get an answer in the morning. It’s actually via customer support that I got introduced to Storetasker. I needed extra functionality beyond the theme, and the wonderful Daniele in customer support made the intro to Storetasker. 

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Brilliant - and how was your Storetasker experience? 

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Initially, I was skeptical. I had bad experiences in the past with 3rd party devs - but I needed the help. 

So I put together my brief which screenshots of what I wanted & the same day I got matched with Lennard - who’s now my 2nd best friend. He fully understood exactly what it was I was trying to accomplish and within a week - he had it done. It 

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So happy to hear Mark. Last question: How have you grown so quickly?!

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Well I would have never guessed it - but we now have sold over 25,000 pairs of Hunny Boots. And to be perfectly honest with you - I don’t know the first thing about optimization or organic growth. 

I do however have a natural knack to be very verbose - so my blog is fairly well built out and every part of the website carries a lot of keywords, which does seem to positively impact my search rankings and in turn my sales. 

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So inspiring. Thank you Mark for sharing your insights.