Interview with Simran Khalsa and Santamrit Violet of Vegan Divine
by Jason Doucette, April 7, 2008
I first found out about Simran Khalsa and Santamrit Violet's business through a Seattle interview I ran across during a news search. Vegan Divine specializes in all vegan gift baskets that specialize in natural, organic, eco-friendly, fair trade and small business products (or some combination thereof! Their company's been online for more than six months, following about a year of planning and research. Read on to find out what's been working for them, what challenges they've faced, and if the "V" word is more help than hindrance in business!
Note: while both sisters were on the call for the interview, I've condensed the responses to a single voice.
OK, tell me about the company.
Vegan Divine is an online gift basket and all vegan gift store. We specialize in all vegan and all natural products. We try to feature as much organic earth friendly, sustainable, and of course all vegan gifts and fair traded gift baskets. We've tried to incorporate as many sustainable items as possible in our gift baskets to show that you can not only receive wonderful gifts and use wonderful products for body care, but you can also be sustainable to the environment and of course vegan as well without any compromise to quality and taste.
That's our goal, and we strive to improve our products by featuring more and more items that are from small businesses and local businesses, so as we grow and expand we can offer more of these products from smaller businesses.
How much time do you spend trying to find new products, and how does that process work?
Before we opened up this business, we took almost a year to research our product line. We went to different expos and found a lot of things there, we went on the internet, pored through magazines, we used all the resources that we could find to locate smaller businesses and even bug businesses so we could incorporate so many standards - vegan, organic, natural, sustainable, fair trade, all of these things. We tried to hit every aspect we could to include these kinds of products in our store. Even now we have ongoing searches for products, and we're still in our first year, so we're learning what kind of baskets and gifts are selling. We've noticed that a lot of the gourmet items are selling much more quickly than the spa products, although if you take a look at our website, we have an
amazing spa line, with no artificial colours or fragrances.
We are just going through this first year and taking note of what demands there are for different kinds of products and going from there. We're going to be attending a natural products expo in the next week or so. There are some major expos that are very helpful, but as far as how much time we spend, it's a really big investment that we made in researching these products, and I think it came from a desire to be able to share natural everyday type of bodycare and of course food items that promote health and wellness.
For us it's in direct alignment with how we live, so it's not something that we felt was a burden to do, it's exciting for us to find these things for ourselves and then share these things with others. To some people, it might sound like "wow, you spent a year," but the time went by really quickly for us because we were so excited to find all these new things and to be able to put them together and share it with other people who share a common interest with Vegan Divine.
When did you launch?
We launched last in July, but we didn't start getting orders until October, believe it or not. The summer was pretty dead, people are gone for the summer, and we learned from our vendors that the summer is the best time to go on vacation, even if you have a business. It was funny, but it was kind of scary because we didn't see anybody ordering anything. Come October we took off, and we had the bulk of our sales in December. What is it, six months now? We consider the actual take off to be October. We launched in July and spent a year prior to that researching everything and putting that all together.
So you opened, you launched, and then silence?
Yes.
That's scary.
Yes.
Did you do anything to try and turn it around? How were you marketing during that time?
From watching other gift basket companies we had figured they go out and find corporate clients, they go to Chambers of Commerce, they target the big coprporations to get them to have an account with them. For us we tried to go that traditional route, that we offer sustainable products, and Seattle is a hub of sustainability right now. We figured this would be a really receptive audience to what we do, and we found that that wasn't really the case. In the very beginning you have to have a website to be able to direct people and you can't market until you have that website, so there's no pre-marketing until you launch your store.
Once we launched our store, Google doesn't recognize you until you've established your online marketing. You have to network with other websites and have partnerships with them and have your presence well known online. For us, that takes time to establish. You either hire someone, or if you're like us with a small startup budget, you have to do it yourself, which means you're going to be spending a lot of hours after work to link up with other companies that would be able to direct customers to you.
We first thought that we would get a lot of support locally, so we went out and promoted our business in local meetups and groups, and we were really active in the Chamber. We were quite surprised to see that we didn't get a lot of support from that. The way that we approached it was that it wasn't like a "go vegan, if you're not a vegan we don't like you," it was nothing like that. Still, just the word Vegan, instead of using a word like organic, or something more universal, we learned that we could have done that instead. People seem to think that vegan is just for vegans. A lot of non-vegans, when they try our products, they're astounded that the items are just as good as "regular" products out there, probably better. We got a lot of great reviews back, so in our newletters that we sent out, we included these statements from our clients so people would know that this is the experience that others have had.
Have you found, from a business perspective, that the word vegan is an impediment to this kind of work?
No, but the problem is that we approached this in the beginning thinking that we were going to target vegans, and the vegans were going to buy from us, and corporate customers would be excited that they'd have a gifting option for their clients that was sustainable without having to worry about allergens, artificial fragrances, synthetics and whatnot, and we thought everyone would be very receptive to this. We didn't realize that our market is primarily coming from Google for Christmas.
We realized that the clients that are coming to us are customers that are looking for gifts for their vegan friends. They're not vegans buying gifts themselves. That was interesting, because we thought the community would be very supportive and that they would want to give gifts to others to share their lifefstyle with others, so it was interesting to see that this wasn't the case. We learned after Christmas that the bulk of our marketing money needed to go to Google and keyword optimization basically, and helping people find us under the words "vegan gift basket." When they're looking specifically for that then yes, we can fill that niche.
So it depends on what perspective you take. If you're going to market specifically to that group, you have to market to people who are looking for gift baskets for vegans.
It depends on what you're trying to sell too. If you're trying to sell vegan gift baskets, the majority of the time people give gift baskets to others, so I guess we found that vegans didn't want to give these baskets to others because I guess they didn't want to seem compelling to others, like "you should go vegan" or something. That's the only conclusion we were able to come to, but again, it depends on what you're trying to sell.
We would recommend that you stay more universal, because it acts as a bridge, and others can become aware of what you offer.
How do you know it's non-vegans buying for vegans?
We have found out from our customers, getting feedback. We also realized that there was a large decline after Christmas, which is kind of expected, but we found through post-sale questionnaires and phone-in orders. We have repeat customers too, and they always send to the same people, so it seems like it's a vegan that they're sending these gifts to.
Are you purely online or do you do local deliveries?
If someone wants to order directly from us they certainly can. The easiest way is to order online, and the majority of our sales are online. We had a few local deliveries that we made, but we don't have a physical storefront.
How did you get your website made?
We have a cousin, and his mother has a gift basket business too, so we were very blessed because it was kind of divinely directed our way. We ended up collaborating with our cousin and our aunt who gave us a bit of direction. Our cousin spent a lot of time and put a lot of soul into helping us have a beautiful website. We knew how we wanted the cart set up and we had to be patient, because he was skilled but he was using a new system, so he had to learn while he was doing this with us, but we didn't have to pay so much, so that was a benefit of working with our cousin.
Go with someone you know that you trust. A lot of people spend a lot of money and if you don't trust them, it's really criticial. Web developers make a lot of money off of businesses who don't know a lot about websites.
Are you marketing through Google primarily through organic search or pay per click?
Both. In the beginning it was pay per click because we weren't ranking high. With Google it takes time to rank higher, but after you get more people linking to you you can ease off of the pay per click. During Christmastime we paid quite a bit of money for the advertising, and during Valentine's we paid some, but I'd say it was a fraction of what we paid during Christmastime. Now we're doing really well. We're on the front page if you search for vegan gift or vegan gift baskets.
Did you work to get to that first page or did it just happen over time?
No, like I said, it's work. You have to find other websites to link up with, it's all online networking. You have to find other companies that share a common interest, that have a links section, that have a directory where clients would look to fulfill their needs. You need to look for other businesses that are green, or sustainable. You need to broaden your categories a bit. Being vegan still counts as being green. People don't realize it, but veganism is totally green.
Finally, I originally tried to conduct this interview on the weekend, but I got an interesting response to that idea. Can you talk a little bit about your weekend work policy?
We came to the conclusion that since we work from home and live at home, we are in the home a lot! Sometimes we've been caught during the weekends, like during the Christmas season, but overall, we need time off and our own space to refresh, revitalize ourselves, so that we can function effectively during the week days.
We have been urged to trust that all is well, and everything that needs to be addressed will be addressed with no loss of time or energy. We have found that in compromising our time off during the weekends, our work energy during the week days become depleted, and so a little time off goes a long way.
For more information on Vegan Divine and vegan gift baskets in general, be sure to visit them at http://www.vegandivine.us/.
Jason is the publisher of TasteBetter.com
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