Building A Brand

By June Ramli
There has been a lot of progress since my last article about LazyBumSkincare and Blitz Hair Oil Spray.
The good news is that I have priced my products and have decided on going with free shipping instead of pricing it separately.
After doing some research on Twitter, I found out that most people would prefer buying things that come with free shipping.
I came up with this conclusion after speaking with the people from Australian Post – by physically walking into their store and DHL via phone to a nice gentleman by the name of Ricky.
It was Ricky and the bloke at the post office that told me that in certain countries, my customers would need to pay some kind of levy to get my products out from the customs and he said this was evident for countries like the UK- a long standing friend of Australia.

Apparently, this is not the case for America and that too if the product is priced under the $1000 mark.
And that means for now, I will only be concentrating on selling my product in Australia and the American markets, not even in my home country of Malaysia yet as the product hasn’t been Halal certified- something most Malaysians are very particular about.
Next, I contacted the good people at MECCA, ICONIC for the third time and Sephora Australia to look at ways on how to onboard my products at their respective websites or place my products at their storefronts.
Being under lock and key for the past year or so, I used Twitter to get in touch with these brands and for Sephora I contacted their customer service to get the necessary leads.
Some of them were nice enough to reply to my tweets and gave me a generic email to send my request to.
At the moment, I am not sure where this would lead. A phone number or a contact name would have been nice to have so that I can actually call and have a proper conversation with the buyer and explain more about my product offering.
I have also listed my product on the Australian Made Campaign website and plan to take on ads there and conduct some competitions to drum up some interest in the brand.
I spoke to a lady there which represents the organisation this week, and although she was down with COVID, she was nice enough to give me a call and tell me that many people were still not back in the office yet, owing to the long Christmas and New Year break and would only be making their way to the office next week.
To get into Sephora Australia, one would need to send a generic email to someone who is based out of Singapore- something I found really interesting and odd at the same time.
Australia is not part of the SouthEast Asia region as well all know, it is part of the Oceania group of countries but yet most requests here still need to go through the Singaporean offices for most things.
Even for certain writing job interviews that I have attended in the past, the interviewee would dial me up from Singapore, conduct the initial screen first with me before passing on my details to their Australian counterpart. These were for big companies like Microsoft, Twitter and IDG Australia.
It has been somewhat mind boggling to say the least that this practice still goes on in 2022.
In Malaysia, a relatively smaller country that is not as developed as Australia- all decisions are made within the country itself. We don’t have to send any request nor do we have to be interviewed by anyone holding a different nationality to work in the country of domicile. That is something that I miss about Malaysia and I hope they never change that stance and take on the style of developed nations as days go by. Anyway, till next week, peeps. Be good.