Today we’d like to introduce you to Eran Arad.
Eran, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Shiny Leaf was established by 3 entrepreneurs with plenty of experience in online marketing and technology. It was set out from day one to create high-quality products for the skin, hair, and body. We figured the way to penetrate the competitive and dynamic e-commerce market would be by creating made-in-the-USA products with harmless ingredients, without parabens, sulfates, and anything that can damage your hair/skin/body. The reason we looked as the Beauty niche as our entry point is tied with our experience from other industries, in a sense that it’s important to create long-term relationship with customers and target repeat purchases.
With Amazon’s being the main e-commerce market and with Amazon becoming a pay-to-play platform, the costs of acquisition of customers will only get high with time, but if your products are good, and your customer service is stellar, repeating purchases will decrease the overall acquisition costs vs. customer value over time.
So, we started, and improved, and learned, and we continue to improve our operations, products, and product selection without losing the core values of the company.
Today we carry an exclusive hair care line with successful hair growth/hair loss shampoos and conditioners, a supplement line with the best formulas in the market, mostly targeting bariatric patient’s must-have vitamins, and smaller lines of facial care and serums, and body oils, organic of course.
Our products can be found online on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, our Mobile App on iOS and Android, Google Shopping, social media, and many other channels, and you may even find us sometimes in your local barbershop.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
The path to success is often paved with some obstacles. Our biggest challenge was production. When you think of it, the environment is dynamic and dramatic. Ingredients prices fluctuates but customers expect a stable price. Production is a challenge of its own and is probably the hardest thing to do. And you have to keep your senses where sales pace may grow unexpectedly.
We believe that the single most important denominator whether your business will overcome such challenges or not is persistence. Never give up never stop learning, always find a way, always remain hungry, and keep improving until you nail it. Those are the pillars of success in almost anything.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
All three partners are start-up in nature and have massive background in running complex and dynamic systems across 4 counties in 3 continents, mostly in the online gaming scene. Between us we have tons of experience in different aspects of management, and the online sphere from SEO and content strategies, social media, promo, and promo planning, CRM and customer service centers, direct-to-consumer marketing, development, and QA, creating brands and managing multi-department businesses, mergers and acquisitions, investment and venture capital and many other aspects of running businesses.
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
All businesses are exposed to different types of risks, and it’s very interesting to see what actions companies do to limit their exposure and de-risk. In our business, for example, there’s the risk of over-dependence on specific sales channel. We may invest more efforts in smaller channels that are growing fast than on bigger sales platform to reduce our dependency in that platform.
There’s another type of risk tied with e-commerce businesses usually being cash intensive. When launching a new product, which is an expensive, time-consuming project, the first production is normally high in relation to the slow sales pace that is expected in the beginning… that’s a risk that our business takes given the chance that the launch will fail, and the product will not increase in pace. There’s always the worry of not producing enough and running out of stock, another risk you need to consider.
Wherever you depend on other parties, there’s always another risk that you need to mitigate. Running out of supplies can be a disaster if you don’t have a backup supplier…
Competitors pose additional risk. Some of our competitors have very deep pockets and a lot of resources, so their go-to-market is significantly shorter and more effective.
Overall, we’re not against taking risks, but we’re pro trying to reduce the chances of them harming the business.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.shinyleaf.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shinyleafusa/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shinyleafusa
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/shinyleafusa
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/shinyleafusa
- Other: https://linktr.ee/shinyleafusa
