Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves and about the business? We’re a group of 5 friends studying commerce and we’re all in an internet marketing course together. For a major project, we decided to create an online store to sell juul skins for Queens students. You can shop our 50+ designs at www.juul-skinzz.myshopify.com. We have a large variety of different designs from schools to brands and colorful patterns. And the best thing is, they’re all $5! Did I mention there’s free shipping?
Where did the idea come from?
We noticed that JUULs had started to become incredibly popular but one aspect of the product that wasn’t really addressed was the ability to customize in order to make the device more personal to the user. JUUL has become very trendy among the university demographic so we felt as though this kind of product could really take off, especially in a university town like Kingston. After conducting some research, we saw that there were several sites offering JUUL skins however most were fairly expensive at a $7-10 price point. In order for our company to succeed we devised several differentiating factors. To be competitive with other companies we opted to price our skins at $5, create designs unique to Queen’s and also direct a portion of our profit toward the Movember Foundation. In order to take the ability to customize even further, we also allow our customers to create their own designs with our provided template. Once submitted, we are able to take the design and manufacture the product for them.
How do you source your products? All the JUUL skins are hand made by us. It’s actually quite a lengthy process to make it and one of our initial challenges was finding the necessary materials we needed to make the product. I’ll go over exactly how we make the skin from start to finish.
1. Purchase a high-gloss sticker paper from amazon
2. Print the JUUL skin template with design onto glossy sticker paper using a professional-grade printer
3. Carefully cut out the JUUL skin with an exacto knife
How are you getting the word out about the business?
That’s a great question. We are primarily using digital marketing tactics to create brand awareness. We have 2 main social channels: instagram and facebook. We share our advertisements and create giveaways to generate engagement on our posts. We saw great success when we posted in the niche, Queen’s groups like “Overheard at Queen’s” or “Queen’s University class of 2022”. Queen’s students became genuinely interested in the content we created and started tagging their friends. This bumped us up on the facebook news feed and got people talking.
What is your favourite aspect of running the company?
Our favourite aspect of running the company is that we get the opportunity to see our products come to a reality. I think we all love the process of taking a concept from idea to reality and ultimately to a customer. I really provides us with a sense of satisfaction that we are able to build a product from scratch that many people across Canada are willing to purchase!
How do you balance working on this with schoolwork? Running this business has been a lot of work and balancing it with a full course load can be really tough. Given that we do have a really good team, we’ve been able to manage our time wisely and always try to plan ahead. We always try to have at least a meeting on a weekly basis to figure out what we have planned next so that we can delegate between the team.
What advice do you have for someone starting a small business?
My advice for starting a business is to identify a problem in the world and find a solution to it. The very best businesses solve a problem in the consumer’s life. The best way to figure out what your customers need fixed is to talk to them firsthand!
If you have an idea, you should certainly go out and pursue it. There’s no time like the present, and if you don’t move fast someone else may execute on your idea. Pull together a team that you enjoy spending time with and can trust, because this makes the whole startup process so much more enjoyable.