Merci Maman Update: How We Grew 30% Last Year
This is a follow up story for Merci Maman. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I started Merci Maman with my wife Beatrice 14 years ago in London, creating personalized jewellery sold online. Merci Maman means “thanks mummy” in French (my mother tongue) and each piece we create is hand-engraved with special names, dates, or messages.
We sell B2C to our end consumers online and have grown significantly over the years thanks to massively positive word of mouth and a significant presence on social media.
PR has certainly helped us especially when Kate Middleton and other global celebrities wore our necklaces. In 2020, despite covid, we grew 30%, and are set to grow at least 30% this year too.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
Since we last spoke in the middle of the pandemic last year, we had to shut down our workshops in London & Paris for a few weeks. However, being online only, at the end of 2020, the business ended on a high with an overall 30% growth.
On our UK & US Instagram, we hit the huge milestone of 100k followers and celebrated by giving flash vouchers in orders for the week.
We migrated to a new website platform in September 2020 called Magento and invested more budget into digital marketing, social media, and SEO. We also analyzed our ROI and marketing strategy overall. We’re constantly looking at where our traffic and revenue come from to ensure we know where to invest our budgets further.
On our UK & US Instagram, we hit the huge milestone of 100k followers and celebrated by giving flash vouchers in orders for the week.
With our jewellery collections, we launched our first ever solid gold collection which was made from recycled gold, which was a great success, and also branched out further into mens & children’s markets.
We also have been working with a CRM specialist to ensure our email marketing is the best it can be, so our customers keep coming back to purchase special keepsakes.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
We’ve done some fantastic brand partnerships with Hello Magazine, Vodafone, and more which has massively increased traffic to the website in which we’ve then been able to re-target our customers.
However, we’ve also made some bad decisions with brand partners, where we’ve paid a substantial amount of money and made a loss with the return. With this, we learn from these ‘mistakes’. Our key values are Make, Try, Share, Grow, and where things go wrong, we’ve tried, and will grow and learn from what doesn't work.
Overall, 2020 has taught me the importance of team spirit and the Merci Maman corporate culture. We have a great team here at Merci Maman, and it’s so important to invest in your team!
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Over the last few years, we’ve invested in our Corporate Social Responsibility to be more eco-friendly, sustainable, and worked with a number of charities in each market. This is something we continue to work on this year and into 2022.
For the upcoming year, we plan to continue to invest in the team, we have a re-platforming on our website to improve the customer journey. We’re also investing heavily in digital marketing.
Our jewellery continues to improve with new materials, designs and sourcing. Continue to improve our product design and sourcing.
We’re really excited with the substantial growth in the US and also Italy, and we plan to open a workshop in Milan and New York in the next years! This will really help us be closer to the customers.
Have you read any good books in the last year?
I’ve been listening to recently ‘How I Built This’ by Guy Raz - a really informative podcast which looks into how large companies such as Mailchimp and Dropbox. Listening to other CEOs and business focused minds inspires me!
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
My top tip I can give to any budding entrepreneur would be to focus on customer satisfaction. This ensures repeat business, positive word of mouth (potential referrals) and also a positive mood in the office. Websites like Trustpilot and Feefo can help you improve this.
Another tip is to invest in your team and look after them too! Our first employee Melanie is still with us today after 11 years and we take pride in that. We have a low employee turnover, and from 1 employee to now 55, we are all family.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We’ve made many recruitments this year and we’re always looking for talents as the business grows but right now we do not have open positions within the team. However, we are growing our retail team in Selfridges and Bon Marche - see our LinkedIn page for job updates!
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
Hey! 👋 I'm Pat Walls, the founder of Starter Story.
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