Joy Dean’s Insights on Starting and Scaling an E-Commerce Brand

Absolutely. Hi guys. I am Joy Dean. I am the owner of Extra Earrings, your cosplay connection for the best in anime, gaming, and costume jewellery.

About five years ago, in 2020, I was working as a differential teacher at the school my daughter taught me. And one of their friends came in one day to give me $375 or something because my daughter and I were here reverting to her needs. So we talked about first pricing strategy because she had enough profit to buy herself ice cream. And then we bought her some food and supplies and leveled roads.

And then just a few moments later, know, the world stopped and there was no more school activities, no more friends, no more anything. We started talking about college and realised that we were on a path to put her in student loan debt like her father and I. So I asked her, hey you, this hobby, what do you think about making it a business? And we kind of went from there.

18 to about 45 year olds that are super into anime or gaming or comics. You know, the fans out there.

We don’t have a lot of direct competitors. We have Etsy, we make a couple and they’re super custom and they need super nice material, it can be costly. And then we have super cheap companies from overseas that their quality is not there. So anything that we get, we repair, we redesign, we use hypoallergenic materials. We make sure it’s safe for you guys so you can enjoy your jewellery without some of the problems you get.

We ship to Australia and Argentina and Greece. We’ll ship anywhere in world.

Demon Slayer is number one. Demon Slayer has a very unique hanafuda design made from cogings that you can see the characters wearing in the show. We have about 45 different styles of that, between some really nice metal forms with some kind kinging jewellery and then some with plastic with real vibrant colours. After that is probably the Bataras from Dragon.

We have tried to launch on social media. We’ve had a few different social media managers that weren’t as targeted. They didn’t really use APIs or anything. So although they drummed up some awareness, it hasn’t really turned into sales or much yet. And then we’ve done a few small group promotions at like DreamCon when we went there and that was our most successful. It even had like a map of where to find us.

Our biggest one is people don’t know we exist unless you see us in con. We can be fantastic person. Not so great on the internet. So when people see it, if they cannot, love it, but they just don’t know we exist until they see it.

Test your products. Test your idea. This is my third business. My first one, I opened a video rental store in College State, Texas in 1998, a year before D &D came out. And I didn’t touch it. I didn’t know what I was looking for. And so it bombed miserably. So if you’re going to try something, test it. We did a few smaller shows without as much of an investment, see if people liked the idea before we started. And that made all the difference. We knew where to put our money. We knew where to invest instead of just kind of doing our thing, to see if it was gonna hit or not.

We have some exciting things coming up. Up until this year, we had only done one big event per year. This year we’re two. We have another one in December. Next year we’re doing five. So that’s kind of a huge jump that’ll be really exciting and get us into a lot more people. And then I have been selected for the blocks, a TV show in January. So we’re going to go do that and use that to start for the next year of our business, really see some big growth taking one small step at a time.

Sure. So up until now, we’ve been doing DreamCon, which is a 70 to 100,000 person event here in Austin, here in Houston. And then we’re also doing an Etsy Expo here in Texas in December. So just anime and gaming-centric events, a lot of cosplay. And of course, we’ll give you the gorgeous tour way to go with it.

About 95 % of our stuff is homemade. So even though we may have to get things from overseas, we take them apart to their basic form, build it back up with quality materials. They are handcrafted and somebody touches them. They’re not just mass produced items like you could get elsewhere. And then this is a family business. Last year, the proceeds paid for two of our daughters who ended up in high school, where Alia, the one that started the business, graduated a year early. Karen, her younger sister, graduated two and a half years early. So all three of my kids are in college. And this year, it pays for two sets of college tuition. So this really does go back to what our initial vision was. So you pay for our kids’ college, get them out of college debt-free.

Absolutely. Thank you guys for having me.