How The Kewl Shop Stays Competitive (Selling Sexy Dresses)

I talked with Charles Fitzgerald about his Shopify store, The Kewl Shop, and came away with loads of actionable insight.

Started in late 2012, The Kewl Shop have quickly grown to become one of the top 150K web sites in the world. Founded by Charles, their focus has narrowed into the supply of top quality bandage dresses, shoes and leggings– areas of immense competition in the online world.

So how do they stay ahead of their competition in an a fiercely competitive niche? Listen and find out. :)

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Transcript

Kurt: Hey, welcome to the fourth episode of the unofficial Shopify podcast. I'm your host Kurt Elster and joining me today is Charles Fitz from the Kewl Shop. Charles, where are you at right now?

Charles: I'm in Bangkok, Kurt. It's late at night. It's about 9:35 pm. Asia exhaustively a beautiful place to be.

Kurt: How did you find yourself in Bangkok?

Charles: It's a bit of a long story. My background is finance. I spent of my work and life in London, some of it in New York as well and ended up working for a big investment bank in Singapore. I've been in Asia for about four or five years now. Touched on Shopify about two years ago, in fact, as a bit of a sideline and now it's developed into a bit more of a full-time role.

Kurt: That's interesting. I think a lot of people do that really. They have something that maybe it starts as a side gig or even a hobby and there's a point where they say, "Okay, I got to jump into this full-time," either for their sanity or for their income, one of the two.

Charles: Probably both.

Kurt: Yeah. For me it was that way anyway. You've got the Kewl Shop, and that's K-E-W-Lshop.com. Not kewlshop.com, we'll link to that in the show notes. What do you sell?

Charles: We sell women's clothing, 18 to 25, 35-year old women's clothing, mainly dresses and particularly a type of dress called the bandage dress which is a form hugging dress for girls and we sell matching shoes that goes with those and a few other ranges. We started out with a pretty broad range of items but over the year or so we've whittled that down to a lot fewer. We just find it more manageable to work with a fewer amounts of product and therefore we've ended up with these dresses and with the leggings and the shoes.

Kurt: That's interesting. You've backed into your niche. How did you get into that niche?

Charles: I think what happened was I did a lot of reading up on this before I started. Everything you read is all about niche, find the niche, find the right one. Sometimes that's very, very difficult to do. I played around a lot. I opened the Shopify store and I put in a very, very broad range of [inaudible 00:02:46] on the store really just to understand what might happen.

As I became better and better I realized how difficult it was to manage such a broad range of product and how complex it was to get the SEO working for those to get to the quality of the product on the website with such a broad range of products and simply went to the one that started selling the best. We ended up with what is three ranges of products and they all sell reasonably well now.

We did waste a lot of time at the beginning with such a broad range. I guess that's the advice about going for a niche is a strong advice. I think the difficulty is finding yo