Nicolas Tranchant was 32 when he left France to follow his Mexican wife back to Mexico in 2012. There, he sets up his own online jewelry business, starting with no money and no knowledge of jewelry. Now, Nicolas manages his own jewelry workshop and leads a team of 4 employees to ship high-end jewelry in France and the USA.
Not knowing my market
When I started my business, I didn’t know enough my market, so I spend 24 months focusing on the wrong market and clients with products that were not profitable enough. When I finally realized that, I could clearly see that I was focusing on the smaller jewelry market, with the lowest prices and margins and the most competitive market. It was like receiving a slap. I quickly completed a market study showing where I would have to move my business to be able to be profitable. I moved from silver jewelry to gold and gemstone jewelry. I was reselling average jewelry before and then started to make my own designs and promote my business on a less competitive market. I became profitable in one year, in 2015, and during summer 2016, I opened my own jewelry workshop to control 100% of the making process of my jewelry.
Because of this mistake, I lost 3 years of struggling. This opened my eyes that a problem is often me being the problem not having the right sight on the market or lacking some skills to solve an issue.
Not being educated in marketing
First, I thought that launching my online boutique would be enough to sell jewelry online. After months of failure to generate traffic and sales, I realize how ignorant I was about marketing and how serious the subject it was. I decided to change that and started to educate myself about online marketing and Search Engine Optimization through books, online webinars, and daily reading on marketing blogs. After few months I was able to move the needle and improve my traffic and generate sales. Since then, I have not stopped reading and educate myself to improve the cash flow of my business. While I was struggling to be profitable as a solopreneur in 2014 with only 8000 unique visitors a month on our online boutique, I have 4 employees now, and our French website generates more than 70 000 unique visits in 2021.
Now that I acquired experience in SEO marketing, I am looking to upgrade my skills to scale my business faster and learn new skills about Instagram marketing.
Being able to recruit and delegate
I would like to say that I already solved this problem, but I am still working on it. Up to now, I have overseen all the important aspects of the business to drive the growth and manage the surplus of workload, up to the point where I have converted myself in the bottleneck of my business. I know that to be able to scale, I need to build up a team around me to take charge of administration and support me on marketing tasks, but up to now, the recruitment I have made turned to be bad ones and I am back where I have started before, alone to manage the administrative part of my business.
Having failed to recruit the right person showed me this was a problem to delegate as not every employee is able to learn new skills and wear several hats as a business owner. So, I am still working in improving my recruitment skill to find the right person, with the right knowledge and the right mindset to help me grow my business.
If you could start over what would you do differently?
I started my business running head down with no direction nor clear goals and without knowing the game. If I could start over again, I would make an in-depth marketing study of the market. Then I would define my goals and set up a marketing sales plan detailing all the sales steps to reach those goals. Then I would make a list of all the knowledge required to be successful with this sales plan, focus on learning the critical knowledge allowing me to control my sales and growth, and delegate all other minor tasks to freelancers or employees.
Nicolas Tranchant Founder / CEO of Vivalatina Jewelry Brand
Top 3 Business Mistakes: Phillip Lew Founder and CEO of C9 Staff
