"Good marketing makes the company look smart, but great marketing makes the customer feel smart." Joe Chernov
Today we are talking about the founder of one of the very few successful startups that are getting popular recently, and that is Amr Kawashti of In Your Shoes
Amr kawashti is 25 years old, and he graduated from engineering 2 years ago but ever since he began his start-up In Your Shoe that is a clothing brand that currently sells unconventional apparel, a product that you rarely see being sold in famous clothing stores around the country but with creative marketing of amr and other co-founders, colorfulsocks became a trend in the Egyptian market.
On his educational background and its relation to his current business
"My educational background is very technical, and I don't use it in like 95% of what I currently do, I had a job in engineering but I left it when I realized there is actual potential in the entrepneurship ecosystem"
So how did he know anything about having his own business? Well, Amr during the early days of his start-up he read a lot of business articles, books, and reached out to other entrepreneurs with more experience than him and asked him about tips and strategies they used to get their business going.
"Whenever I see someone that inspires me I just send him a message, I am amr, I am impressed with your work and I want to talk with you, there is no formula for success there is no article you going to read and become the next bill gates. You just need to look around for what fits for you, you just need to find this eagerness to become successful.”
The idea of starting a business on colorful socks , had a lot planning behind it, as amr and one of his friends Ezz Tarek saw that colorful socks are an underrated product that you can barely find in the Egyptian market although whenever they wear them it catches a lot of attention from people and specifically their friends
"We kind of always had the idea of starting a business in the back of our minds, and when we thought of colorful socks as our product we started doing surveys and just trying to see if the idea of colorful socks is appealing to people as much as it is to us, and just like that we started our business, we had nothing but a page on Instagram with 7 designs of colorfulsocks with 0 employees with us, having more than 300 product variants on our website, and our products are available in vendors as well like Virigin, Souq & Noon..."
One of the things that make in your shoes unique among other start-ups is their approach in marketing, as they use a variety of ways from creating engaging content using pictures of actual clients enjoying their products more than maybe an unrealistic photo session with a model.
"Ezz is the content guy, making all the posts the stories and even the memes we use, I mostly take care of the website and the marketing campaigns we create, I just try to make our page appealing to the biggest amount of people, I believe marketing is a two-way conversation where you start, but when you reach around a million-person a month it is hard to make content that pleases everyone, but I think what made us successful so far is the idea that everyone in our company from content creators to designers and even our clients belong to the same generation, that's why our marketing is heavily toward gen-z and millennials we simply talk the same language."
If you don't have goals you will achieve your dreams only when you are sleeping and that is something that amr truly believes, on being asked if he finds himself successful or nothe replied
"I can say I am pleased with the experience so far, but the fact is what we reached is only about 10% of what we hope for in the future, and I think that is the reason why we are still growing while other start-ups are slowing down or shut down completely, you need to have a certain vision for your business to succeed and you will need to continuously come up with ideas to keep your business going" I think it's true what they say, you need to be 60 million years old to be a dinosaur in real life but probable a few months to be a dinosaur in business
With Amr also expanding their product line up with hats and pijoys staying fresh with all kind of clothing that you will hardly find anywhere else
Amr gathered up some knowledge and started his business first of all with an idea, surveys for people to find out they will like the idea or not then created something called a minimum viable product which is just a simplified version of the product that you make early on just to see what kind of feedback you get so that you can decide if you want to continue and produce the actual product or not, and of course, you need to understand the idea of the product-market fit, if 1000 brand is fighting in a specific field it is better to compete in another or simply come up with an idea that you won't have much competition with, just like colorful socks.
Great usage of social media was the core of the success of in your shoes, simply starting from the catchy name "The whole point behind the name that if I were in your shoe I would buy this product plus the fact that socks are in your shoes, it is a pun."
With marketing being a two-way conversation as we said, listening to your customers is as important to talk to them as amr says "Customer feedback can give you insights that you can never think of or predict, that's why you need to always care about the feedback, and you cannot just predict what customers are going to think, that's why surveys are very important, for example in the European market the idea of colorful socks was more popular with men than women while here its more of a 50 50."
There are several problems you may face starting your own business but what amr thinks the hardest is trying to have a good team with you "When someone has to leave for any reason it is not easy at all to replace him and find someone else to do exactly what he did, to find a group of people with the same drive ambition and drive is hard."
On the current state of business, Amr says "I think social media gave everybody a chance of marketing his product, of course, there will be huge brands, of course, there will be 100-year-old huge companies that will pay tons of money for their advertisement, but you can still compete with all of them, in the end, all the customer wants is quality for the price they pay, as long as you have the quality and a few tricks to make the people like your product you can compete in the market, sometimes you can even find a unique product that catches the eye in the startup and won't find in the multi-million company, who knows, maybe your start-up will reach this level one day."
Interviewer: Bahaa Hossam
Editor: Nagla Aly Khalifa
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