In the fourth installment of our Ecommerce Superstars, we are interviewing the Bob Ellis, the founder of Bavarian Clockworks, a company that manufactures Black Forest cuckoo clocks.
You can read the previous installments in this series here. Through this ecommerce series, we want to inspire young people to take the initiative of starting their own business. Our aim is to help them succeed through insightful interviews and helpful tips and tricks.
Let’s listen to his story.
How It All Started
Bob Ellis is a long-time business owner with experience in setting up insurance, real-estate, and hospitality based businesses. All these were offline brick-and-mortar ventures that depended on the local market for success. This however limited the growth opportunities, and so he took the initiative of starting an online store. He explains, “I reached a stage in my career where I was looking for a new challenge. I wanted to start a company that could scale and didn’t have a ton of overhead. Ecommerce seemed like the perfect fit.”
Bob starting hunting for niches that he could easily enter and attract the right online audience. After an onerous search, he finally settled for the cuckoo clocks.
He credits his passion for craftsmanship and antiques that showed him the way. “I had visited Germany in the past and bought a cuckoo clock for my home. This was an industry I was interested in, and I knew I could leverage my previous experience of running brick and mortar companies,” Bob maintained.
His Quest for the Right Business
For Bob, this online business was a first. He maintained that ‘picking the right market was one of the biggest reasons for his success.’
He said that ecommerce is so competitive with Amazon, Walmart, and other big players in the market that it can be hard to find an advantage. So, before starting his company, he researched different industries. His plan was to discover a niche that was, ‘large enough to support a growing business but not completely saturated with competitors.’
His Marketing Strategy
Bob Ellis, the founder of Bavarian Clockworks, said that SEO is an important factor for success. He tried to capture higher positions in major search engines to divert traffic and land sales. He attributed his success to the due diligence he conducted before starting this business.
Bob offered the following tips for young ecommerce business owners:
- Pick a market where competition is low
- Conduct due diligence before you start your ecommerce business to verify the level of competition
- Use high quality images and videos in content marketing because of the huge impact on customer decision
- Don’t neglect SEO. It is essential for organic growth of your business
- Optimize home and product pages for long tail keywords and add new blogs consistently
- Cultivate relationships with journalists, bloggers in your niche and industry so as to add value to your business
- Create a knowledge base that answers all customer queries and educates them about the product and the industry
- Initiate PR campaigns to add guest posts to relevant sites. Write feature articles, and conduct podcasts for better reach.
- Get backlinks from relevant websites to improve your site’s authority
The Business Challenges
In the beginning, Bob had to run the store on razor thin margins. Meanwhile, he developed relationships with overseas partners. “In order to negotiate the best prices from our suppliers in Germany, we had to order a significant volume of products. But because the company was still in its infancy, it didn’t make sense to make large orders at the time.”
This problem was solved by the passage of time. “Fortunately, as we grew and gained more market share, we were able to negotiate better pricing and terms with our suppliers,” Bob concluded.
His company now offers great value while remaining profitable. “As our relationship with our supplies have developed, so have our product offerings. We now sell more styles of clocks and are looking to expand and offer different types of German gifts as well,” he added.
Bob Ellis, CEO Bavarian Clockworks, with his German Cuckoo Clocks
His Biggest Sales
Bob said that his sales nearly doubled during the holiday season ( as compared to previous year). “The holidays are a critical time for us since our business is somewhat seasonal,” he added.
But nonetheless he is happy with the results in terms of revenue. His only regret is, “I had very little free time, and in the future would like to be able to enjoy more of the holiday season with my friends and family. Next year we may look to hire temporary staff during the winter. This could help us keep up with the spike in orders and customer inquiries during the busy holiday rush.”
His Advice to the Beginners
His number one advice is learn to manage cash flow. “Study which products move fast and which ones sell less or are more seasonal,” Bob said, adding that these insights can help the beginners organize products into different segments based on the number of products they want to sell in a given period. This helps in accurate order placement and avoiding excessive and slow moving inventory.
Get to know more about Bob Ellis by reaching him on Twitter.
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Note: We are accepting submissions for our ecommerce success story series. If you are a successful ecommerce store or a flourishing dropshipping business, then drop us a line.
Sajjad Shahid
Sajjad is an Ecommerce Community Manager at Cloudways. He loves helping out Ecommerce store owners, merchants and marketers in establishing their businesses and startups. Sajjad enjoys playing table tennis and cricket over the weekend.
