Designer plans own website, store after social media success

Sales currently come in at between Bt100,000 and Bt250,000 a month.
Supida started doing business online four years ago, and her Instagram fan page soon managed to generate rising sales interest – from 10 items of clothing to around 100 pieces a month.
“I started in business by chance, but now my challenge is to drive my business growth for the long term,” she said.
Supida graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in hotel management from Sripatum University in 2010, after which she trained to be a barista in Australia for about six months.
On her return to Thailand, she started her working life as a barista at a coffee shop in Bangkok’s Sukhumvit area for about a year, before resigning to take up a post in marketing and sales at a property firm.
At the same time, Supida’s lifestyle – like so many of today’s young generation – involved posting pictures on Instagram and Facebook when she had new clothes to wear.
Some of her fan-page followers on these social-media platforms found her choice of clothing interesting and asked her where they could buy similar items, an interest that inspired Supida to launch her own business.
“In the early stages, I did business by buying the clothes and distributing them to customers, charging them a lower-than-normal margin. But after a year, I decided to start designing clothes myself and sent the designs to a tailor’s shop to make them for me. I spent about Bt100,000 on starting my own business this way.
“Then I would model my own-design clothes and post pictures on my Instagram and Facebook pages. That got positive feedback via the fan pages, and the level of orders built up to between 300 and 500 items of clothing a month,” Supida recalled.
Following this growing demand, Supida started to use her own brand, Lilydale, which she named after the Australian town where she trained to be a barista.
At present, Supida operates via www.facebook.com/lilydalebrand, and has to pay an average of Bt1,000 a day for Facebook to promote her webpage.
“I have to design an average of three new collections a month, each of which generates around 60 new orders per month.”
She added that the main sales season for clothing was the first and final quarters of each year, when people change their wardrobes to celebrate the new year, summer and winter.
“Our sales average 500 pieces of clothing per month at an average price of Bt500 in the high season, and between 100 and 200 pieces a month in the low season,” she said.
Currently, her Facebook page has more than 4,000 fans, with some of her orders coming from customers in Japan, Australia and Europe.
Given the business’s online success, Supida has more recently expanded her marketing options by taking part in trade events to promote her products.
“Joining a trade event gets more positive feedback from customers than the online channel because they can actually taste the clothes. At the last such event, at CentralWorld last weekend, I was able to sell Bt60,000 worth of clothing over three days. This success has inspired me to open my own shop, alongside selling my products via the online channel,” Supida said.
With four years’ experience in conducting business via social media, she said opening her own online store would be a different type of challenge.
While she would be spending less on marketing to promote her products and would also be able to expand both her domestic and overseas customer base, online business also has its risks, not least that a buyer can place an order via paying a booking fee but then choose not to follow through on the final purchase. This could result in her business having more inventory than was desirable, she said.
However, Supida suggests that entrepreneurs with little initial capital to start a business could do worse than following the path she has taken to date. That is, display their products online or via social media to establish the business and build up capital for future expansion, so that they can then open their own website and actual shop, as she intends to do this year and next.