Building A Brand

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By June Ramli

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After a week-long hiatus, this column is back! Last week, I took a much-deserved break and visited the Islands of the Gods for nine glorious days.
This is not my first visit to Bali but my third with the last visit being six years ago in 2016.
I loved the experience I had this time on the island as it was a chance for me to reconnect with two old friends which I have not seen for three years and made some new friends along the way.
I did bring my laptop to sneak in a bit of work whilst I was there but with the unstable Internet connection, this was not possible at all.
Luckily I was smart enough to put everything on autopilot as far as DailyStraits.com was concerned before I went on my break. Yes, that meant I had to source nine stories and schedule them before my trip so that these stories would appear on the site automatically while I was away. 
A little bit of backstory here, I was supposed to go to Bali in 2020 and whilst my flight wasn’t cancelled then, I had the jitters due to coronavirus and decided to pull out at the very last minute and after many phone calls begging Qantas and Jetstar for mercy, one guy from Qantas finally relented to my pleas and allowed me to cancel my ticket and turn my balance into a credit voucher in which I could use in the future. Actually, my original ticket did not have this leeway, but the guy on the phone Samir if I recall his name correctly was kind enough to allow me to obtain a credit voucher. I did try to use the credit voucher for Perth last year but I couldn’t go ahead with their trip due to some unforeseen circumstances and it was back to square one all over again. Finally, last month, I used the credit voucher for my original intended destination, Bali, and it worked out splendidly. I am glad I followed my intuition and postponed the trip because I don’t think I would have met and had this much fun had I taken the trip as originally planned in 2020. 
I must confess that before heading to Bali, I wasn’t too keen on the trip but now that I have taken it, I am glad I did so and hope to return to the island regularly and established some kind of business relationship with the people there. 
My short visit to Bali this time, had me rekindle a long-lost idea I had with shoes. Ten years ago, I had a brilliant idea of infusing Batik with boots and I am happy to note that it turned out to be a pretty decent design however I couldn’t go on with the idea then due to unforeseen circumstances but fast forward to 10 years on I have decided to revisit the idea using Australian Aboriginal artwork. And the results have been astonishing. I am now looking at getting funding to kick start this project on a larger scale.

Next, my work on Amazon is still pending, I still haven’t onboarded my products onto their Sydney warehouse, as I need to print some barcodes onto each of my products before sending it over. If I don’t print these barcodes myself, Amazon would charge me an additional $200 for them to do it. This whole process of onboarding my items onto the warehouse is simply not exciting and because of that, I am procrastinating the whole thing right now. So, help me, god. Anyway, in the midst of all these struggles I am facing with Amazon, it got me thinking of onboarding all of my products to the US market as well. Since I am now dedicating my time to this cause only, I may as well go all out and try the US market as well. Stay tuned for more updates on this in the coming weeks. Till my next update, be swell. 

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