Built and sold Shopify ecomm store

Rising Sun Prints was a specialist ecommerce retailer of beautiful Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, which I started as an expression of my love of Japanese art and culture. After building up the business, brand and achieving profitability, I sold my 100% stake in the business in a private sale in June 2020.

Challenge

Paid media / advertising cuts into ecommerce margins and makes them extremely thin on niches such as printed products. Typically, this is made up in volume, but Japanese Ukiyo-e prints were not mainstream enough, and shipping costs on framed prints were too high to run high-volume, global ad campaigns.

To make the business sustainable, profitable and differentiated, we needed to build organic community and fans of the brand around a shared passion for Japanese art and culture, to drive our customer acquisition cost close to zero (essentially just the cost of creating high-quality content and maintaining a high-converting website).

Approach

I focused on organic social media, an artisanal, unique, in-depth approach to art

Deliverables

• High-converting Shopify ecommerce site (web design, CRO)

• Social media marketing (Instagram, Facebook)

• Community

Results

• A community of over 50,000 highly engaged followers on Instagram and Facebook

• Outstanding website and high-quality digital assets (blogs, product videos, descriptions, etc.)

• Profitable and growing, with healthy margins

The business was spotted by a private buyer in the US and ultimately acquired via Shopify Exchange.