Next week is National Small Business Week and
PayPal is excited to share stories and advice from successful online businesses. We sat down with Nikki Gentry – founder of My Dreamlines, personal sketches of wedding dresses for anniversary gifts – to find out what inspires her and what advice she has for other aspiring small business owners.
What inspired you to start your business and how did you come up with the idea for it?
I was a stay-at-home mom and wanted to keep my resume fresh, so I decided to work from home for a while. I started selling wedding invitations. My aunt is an amazing artist, so I asked her if she wanted to personalize the invitations by drawing them. We were featured in a bridal magazine, and then a customer asked us if we would sketch her wedding dress. I put the drawing on my website, and we started getting more and more orders for wedding dress sketches. The first day [in 2014] I had two orders, the next day four, and so on. And it grew from there. From 2014 to 2015, my sales increased by 803%.*
What were some of the challenges you faced when you started My Dreamlines?
I tried some experimental email marketing. It was the last thing on my list that I hadn’t tried. I purchased an email list, targeting brides and grooms together. It performed poorly because, as it turns out, my market is really grooms, who are getting married or just got married, and husbands, who are looking for an anniversary gift. Now, I’ve done so much experimental marketing that I know what works for me.
How is My Dreamlines using PayPal today?
Well, I've been a business account holder with PayPal [] for 10 years, and I love the variety of the services they offer. I think it’s fantastic that PayPal offers a financing option for my customers [through
PayPal Credit**]. Our average order [cost] can get pretty high, so it’s helpful to give grooms the flexibility to pay for their purchases over time.
I also use
PayPal Invoicing. Sometimes a customer will add to their order, and I can send them an invoice within a minute, which they can pay immediately. Everything is clean and simple.
I use PayPal to process my credit and debit card transactions. I only ever had one, tiny issue with a customer's credit card, and PayPal took care of me and took care of the customer.
What advice would you give entrepreneurs looking to start a business?
Listen to your customers. When I started marketing my business, I marketed it as “Dreamlines wedding dress sketches” because that's what I sell. Well, I put a chat button on my website, which completely changed everything within my business. I learned from my customers what my keywords should be. Husbands search for "one year anniversary gift" or “first year anniversary gift,” not “wedding dress sketch.” So, I realized that I should market those keywords, and it’s had a huge impact on traffic to my site and increased my completed sales.
Also, make sure to network and build yourself a support system. I ended up connecting with amazing people. I had a mentor, I had a life coach, I became very involved in the community and the Chamber of Commerce. I just surrounded myself with as many people as I could, since I had no idea what I was doing at the beginning, and I didn't want to reinvent the wheel.
*Data are based on the business’s own internal analysis. Results not typical and will vary by business.
** PayPal Credit is subject to consumer credit approval, as determined by the lender, Comenity Capital Bank.