695 Carina Hatton:

No entrepreneur ever succeeded without coaches, ideally ones who have already been there and built that. Because mistakes are expensive and why reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to? My guest today – Carina Hatton – is an expert in all things e-commerce, having built her own online clothing boutique to 7 figures. She now coaches e-commerce entrepreneurs and shares today how to avoid all the most common mistakes and prosper.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur who has lived and breathed the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses, currently the game changing social podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment and join the Wings community over on Podopolo, where we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring e-commerce entrepreneur who built her own online clothing boutique, Knitted Belle, to 7 figures before launching a new business to help entrepreneurs launch and succeed in the e-commerce space.

Carina Hatton, a mentor and coach for e-commerce entrepreneurs, shares actionable insights to help you get started today, whether you are getting your business off the ground or in the process of scaling.

So, you want to set up shop online. There is a proven way to do it right, and like any business, hundreds of ways you can get it wrong. Today we break down all the common mistakes new e-commerce entrepreneurs make – and how to avoid them.

Carina Hatton scaled her own e-commerce clothing company, Knitted Belle, to 7-figures, and now she’s is on a mission to help others do the same.

Carina started her own business at five years old, selling magazines door to door. Her first real job was as a cashier at a local garden center, and by 14 years of age she was working every single area of the store.

Her entrepreneurial spirit soon combined with her love of fashion, and Knitted Belle Boutique was her dream come true. And having experienced the unique challenges of building a successful, online fashion business, Carina has helped hundreds of boutique owners experience growth that they only dreamed of before working with Carina.

Today we talk about how to select your ideal product, why you need first to know exactly the person you want to sell to, how to price your product and much more.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Carina Hatton, and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode – plus be sure to follow Carina’s new podcast there, She Crushes Ecom.

Melinda Wittstock:

Carina, welcome to Wings.

Carina Hatton:

Hello. Glad to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, you’re an e-commerce star, of course, with lots of advice and inside secrets about how you grow your business of course learned along the way. Let’s just start at the start. Where do most people go wrong when they’re setting up an e-commerce business?

Carina Hatton:

Gosh, there are so many ways you can go wrong. Some of the top things that I see are they will just randomly buy products. So they will say, “Hey, I’m going to open an online store. Let me just go out there on the internet and search and try to find some places to get products wholesale.” And it can turn into a big disaster because I have seen ladies spend thousands of dollars on products that are not sellable. They will go and they’ll buy at the wrong price, they’ll buy from the wrong people. And it’s very sad in that situation because usually by the time they find me, they’re in a desperate situation. They have bought this product, they’re trying to figure out how to sell it, it’s not working, and they’re panicking. So that is one thing I would suggest is-

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, let’s pick that apart because I know certainly in my entrepreneurial career, business is hard, starting anything is hard. And if you don’t have an alignment between what it is you’re selling and who you are as a person, or like your mission or whatnot, just even at that level, it becomes so much harder.

Carina Hatton:

Yeah. And they will literally just go to… Alibaba’s a good one, and they’ll go there and they’ll just buy lots of products. And the first thing that I walk them through when ladies start to work with me is who is your customer? Let’s figure that out first. And the other kiss of death is I want to be a one stop shop. Whenever I hear that, I know we’ve a lot of work to do because you cannot win as a one stop shop unless you have millions of dollars to spend on inventory.

Melinda Wittstock:

Unless you’re Amazon. I mean, Amazon is the closest that we’ve ever seen to a one stop shop. So sure, you could take on Bezos.

Carina Hatton:

Right. And so the idea is, oh, my friend thinks I should sell men’s clothes, but I really want to sell baby clothes, and my mom says she’s been looking for clothes and can’t find what she’s looking for. And so what we do at that point is I have a customer exercise and we figure out who is that one person? And it’s just one that you’re going to sell to. So whenever you go shopping for your store, you’re thinking, would she wear this? And that is the best place to start. And you really, really have to drill it down. You cannot go and open a shop with babies’ clothing and women’s clothing and shoes and accessories even, and you have to be very, very focused.

So those are some of the common mistakes that I see ladies make, and it really makes me sad too, because once you’ve jumped, if you jumped into the wrong pond, you then become desperate, right? Because then you’ve got maybe your husband or boyfriend or someone else in your life saying, hey, you need to sell that stuff. We need that money back. And then they become desperate. And then it the whole thing just starts rolling downhill, and then they mentally just lose it. And so that’s a pretty common thing that I see with ladies just getting started.

Melinda Wittstock:

Mm-hmm (affirmative) 100%. Did you ever know the Amazing Selling Machine or ASM for Amazon sellers? And that was all teaching people about how to become an Amazon seller, and how to know which products were the things to buy based on what was selling on Amazon. A lot of people did well with that, but it wasn’t necessarily aligned with what is it that they wanted to sell or who their actual, like you said, who their actual target customer is. And I wonder to what extent that has kind of influenced it the way the whole Amazon seller’s market.

Carina Hatton:

Right. Well, I think a lot of ladies think, oh, I just need to find something that people will buy, and in that case, then you’re just the middle man. There’s no passion or anything behind it. So when you have a bad day, it’s like, oh, well, I should quit. This isn’t fun anymore. So a big part of being successful is having something that you’re passionate about in the process and knowing your why. That’s another thing that we work on initially in the very beginning. It’s okay, owning a business is hard, you’re going to have bad days, and what do you lean on when you’re having those bad days? It’s going to be what you call your why, why am I doing this? And so it’s really a deeper thing than people think in the beginning. I think some people are like, oh, I want to make some extra money, so I’m going to go buy some product and sell it. And being successful is way deeper than that.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so on the e-commerce side of things, it’s not just what products you’re selling, but then it gets into the marketing, like how are you going to find your customer? And you think about all the stuff you got to set up, all your funnels, I guess your Shopify, if you are selling on Amazon, all these things, and that can be quite overwhelming.

Carina Hatton:

Right. So what you really need to do is I’m a Shopify partner, by the way. So I love Shopify. I’ve used it since 2013. You need to find a platform to call home. There are some ladies that say that they own an online business, but they’re just selling on a Facebook page. And there are a couple reasons that’s not a great idea. One is Facebook is Facebook. We all know people that have lost their accounts, what if you grow this business and you lose your account and the business is just gone in a heartbeat? The other thing is when you just have a Facebook page or a Facebook group, it may be great now, but what if someone wants to go shopping and you’re not on there selling things, how do people buy from you? Do they have to go somewhere and post like, hey, I want this?

And so it’s kind of on your time in that case, right? And that’s not a great way to do business. You want to be open for business when your customer wants to shop, when it’s convenient for them. And so by having a website, an actual store where they can go shop and give you money when they’re ready to do it is life changing. And I have ladies that wake up to sales all the time. You are making money without even doing anything, instead of, oh, I have to go live so I can make some money.

Melinda Wittstock:

So Carina, when you think of all the tips and tricks, and we’ve talked about a couple of them, like knowing your market and selling the right product and that kind of thing, but when it comes to actually starting from zero as a first time entrepreneur and getting to that magical seven figures in sales number, take me through what your process is to help women get there.

Carina Hatton:

Well, a big part of it is having the right product in the beginning and a large part of staying in business to get to seven figures is making sure that you’re pricing it appropriately, but you’re buying it appropriately. So you’re not over paying for the product, you’re not selling it for too little. That’s another thing that is super common is that ladies don’t value themselves and what they’re doing enough to charge the proper price, right? To stay in business and actually make money at it. So those are a couple key things. The next thing is consistency. You have to be consistent. You cannot just work on this one day and then set it aside and work on it a week later and hope for the best. The ladies that are successful that are in my program, they work a business every single day. And you can tell who’s actually doing the work consistently and who’s not by what their sales are.

There are tons of strategies, but how we do it is we use several different things, we use popups, we use live selling, we use events, we use social media, and we use email. So it’s a combination of all of those things. And you’re going to find when you get started that there may be one or two of those that you really like to do, and maybe one or two that you really hate to do. What you have to do is figure that out and then lean into that and be extremely consistent in doing those things over and over.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, what good advice. I mean, that applies to any business, and the jump off point there is hire your weaknesses. So as you have revenue coming in, if there are things that need to be done that you don’t like doing, there’s somebody else that loves to do that. Are most of the people that you work with solopreneurs? Do they continue on as solopreneurs? Or do they tend to start to create teams as they scale their revenue?

Carina Hatton:

It’s funny, I wouldn’t call it a team like you would consider maybe an office job team. It’s more like, hey, my niece helps me with social media, my husband helps me pack orders. It’s more of like a family affair, and that’s one of the things I love about it. It’s not quite as formal. And you can really run the business that way until you start to see that. I would say, once you get up into probably the 400,000 or more mark, you’re going to probably need to start adding people. But up until that point, it’s more of like, who can I get to help me do this stuff that I don’t like to do? The first thing that I hired out, actually I hired it out to my mom, and my mother-in-law was packing orders because I literally hate packing orders.

Carina Hatton:

I love selling, I love the marketing, but I cannot stand to sit there and pack stuff. So I think once you get into it, you’ll see that. And then you’ll have people volunteer like, hey, can I help you? Because it’s exciting. You’ll always have those fans that are like, “Hey, let me come over and we can hang out and I can help you.” So it’s more like that, I would say.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so once you’re starting to get towards that seven figure number, how many folks want to, or can scale beyond that? What does it take? Say you have a couple of products or one or a line or something like that, and you decide, okay, now I’m going to start to branch out, what’s the best advice there? Do people sometimes run into trouble when they start to do that?

Carina Hatton:

They do. It is really, really hard. I always advise the ladies in my program to stick to the basics, right? There are certain collections that sell quicker than others, certain types of things, just stick to those, right? And then if you have extra time and money to spare, then you can start adding other products, because all that does is add a whole other layer to what you’re doing. And by adding layers, you’re taking risks, right? Let’s say, for example, looking back, I decided I had this grand idea that I was going to add gifts and home goods to my boutique. Those things are so hard to sell online. Even if you have a huge audience, a huge customer list, it’s not that they’re hard to sell, but they sell more slowly. Right?

And so, you get used to the products that sell well, and then you have these lines that don’t sell as well, and you think, wow, they’re taking up my time. I’m having to add people to help me because I’m carrying these products. And the way I always looked at it was there’s a $100,000 sitting right there. If only I had invested that in these other lines that sell quickly, I would have that money back and I would have profit back with it. So I think it’s nice to want to grow, but you will never hear me say that. I will always say stick to what works, deep dive into that. Go deep, do not go wide.

Melinda Wittstock:

Really, really smart. And I guess there’s a lot of iteration too. Like you mentioned pricing before on finding the right kind of pricing and understanding where you sit relative to competitors, how much deep dive competitive research is part of the equation of what product you want to sell?

Carina Hatton:

Well, I would say if you have a coach, I mean, that is literally the best because I’m advising them, here’s the minimum that you want to charge for something, here’s the maximum. You go off your gut and off your experience when it comes to that. If you’re first starting out, I think it can be good to look at competitors, but also it can be really, really bad because just because they’re out there with products listed does not mean that those products are selling. Right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, you have no idea what’s actually going on, right? So it can seem like, oh, they’re selling it for this, so I will too. Yeah.

Carina Hatton:

Right.

Carina Hatton:

You don’t know, they may be not sleeping at night because they’re not selling stuff. And just because they have products out there for that price doesn’t mean that it’s good, and it doesn’t mean that they’re making money. A very common thing is when ladies I first talk to them, oh, there’s a boutique in my town and they’re carrying these types of things, and they’re way less than what you’re telling me to charge. And I say, well, guess what, they probably won’t be around as long as you, because they’re not making enough money to stay in business, and two, they’re attracting the wrong type of customer, right? When you’re a small business, you are not Walmart. And you have to keep that in mind. You do not want to build a customer base of people who shop on price. Those people are not loyal.

So you want people that are going to shop with you because they like you, they like your style, you have a relationship with them. And you don’t want people that are just going to shop because you’re the cheapest place in town. So I always tell the ladies, stick to your guns, put on your blinders, do not look at them, because even if they’re selling stuff, it is going to wear them out. They are going to get, because people that shop based on price are not loyal. So those customers don’t care one bit about that relationship. So it’s really hard. It’s really hard to look at competition and say, I don’t care what you’re doing, but that’s kind of how you have to do it. I mean, that’s how you hit some figures.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think the other thing though, that’s so interesting about women in business is that we do tend to feel compelled to underprice ourselves. Do you find that a lot? Are women like, because… Sorry. Carina, do you find that a lot? I mean, it comes up in this podcast a lot where if we’re undervaluing ourselves, if we’re lacking confidence somewhere, or have some sort of subconscious block somewhere, we’re going to think that we’re not worthy of charging what is the actual right price. How many of your students, if you will, have a tendency to want to price lower?

Carina Hatton:

I would say at least 50% to 70% of them. It is a constant battle for me. And I say battle in a good way, but I’m constant saying, you need to mark your stuff up, you need to mark your stuff up. They think that it won’t sell because I think what is skewing their view is they know what they paid for it. And so that’s the thing. When you start to see behind the scenes of what stuff actually costs, it feels weird to charge as much as I’m telling them to charge. And there’s also a sort of disbelief that someone would actually pay that much for it. They forget that the customer can’t get it unless they get it from them. They forget that they did all the work to get it there, to pick it out, to prep it, to ship it, all of that, the marketing, the time.

And so my famous line is if Target has it for less than you, you are too cheap. I say it at least once a week. I actually went to Target last week and I took a picture of a dress they had on sale for $48.99. And I put it in my group of my academy ladies and they were laughing and it caused so much conversation because they’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe Target selling a dress for $49 because my minimum for them is $42. And some of them have a hard time with it. I’ll call them out and say, no dress less than $42. I don’t care what you paid for it. I don’t care if you paid $5 for it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Carina Hatton:

So that’s a good measure. You have to have something, I feel like, to compare yourself to. You’re not Target, you’re an action boutique. You’re a small business. Target buys on volume, right? So you’re supposed to be more than that. And that kind of gives them, I think, a little bit of pause and then they think, okay, I can do this.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, there’s also a lot of psychology around this too, that people actually value things that they pay more for, like there are more likely to value it, or think that it’s real.

Carina Hatton:

Yeah, totally.

Melinda Wittstock:

Like if it’s too inexpensive, it’s kind of like, this must not be that great then.

Carina Hatton:

Yeah. And that’s the thing. I’m always saying, okay, this is really interesting. How about, let’s say you have a product that’s like $14, right? And you mark it up to $19, let’s say it’s a pair of earrings, your customer, if they like those earrings, they don’t care if they’re $14 or if they’re $19, right? What’s $5 if it’s something you like? Okay, so think about this. Let’s say you have six pack of those earrings, that’s $30 more profit that you made for doing the same exact thing that you’re already doing. Right? Okay, now let’s think about this. Let’s say you did that 100 times over the course of a year, let’s say you have 100 products and you just priced them $5 more. Think about how much extra money that is. What is that? $3,000 in profit that you would’ve lost because you were too scared to charge $19 instead of $14.

Melinda Wittstock:

What about the resistance to knowing your numbers? Numbers are great storytellers, right? But in all the mentoring I’ve done of female entrepreneurs and just even overcoming this myself in my own kind of serial entrepreneur journey, it’s like being able and willing to look at the numbers and actually be on the margins, like know what’s happening with your business. Is that a big lift for some of your folks?

Carina Hatton:

I feel like numbers are scary and I feel like they’re not as much fun. Right? And so you don’t have to be an expert, but you do need to know, like on Shopify, you do need to know how to go look at your reports and understand a few key things, like what is my profit? And to know what you can tweak, like your percentage of returning customers, little numbers like that. So I don’t tell them, you have to know everything, hire CPA. Literally I love numbers, but I have no desire to dig super deep into them beyond how can I make more cashflow and how can I make more profit? So you at least need to know the basics, like how to figure out your profit. And it’s shocking too. Once I show them that and they look at it, they’re like, wow, so for every $10 thing I sell, I’m actually making $6 in profit? It’s like, oh, okay, well, this was fun, but I’m making money too. So I think it helps build the confidence too.

Melinda Wittstock:

So you were sort of a natural entrepreneur, you started pretty young.

Carina Hatton:

Yeah, I would say so. My first foray  into selling was going door to door when I was five. I had a current magazine and I made $1 for each product. So I memorized the script. And thinking back I’m like, why would my mom let me go door to door when I was five years old? I guess she knew the neighbors, and we lived on a cul-de-sac. But anyways, so I did, I made $8, I sold eight products, and I was just totally hooked. And so when I was 14, my parents had always owned their own business too. I think that was a huge part of it. But when I was 14, I got a job at a lawn. It was like a lawn and garden place. And I was a cashier. And I remember I was offended because they were looking for a new manager and they didn’t even look at me. Now forget the fact that I was 14, right?

I thought that I should be up for this management position because I knew how to do everything in the entire store, because in my downtime, I would go learn other departments and things like that. Then I went to school, went to college, and when I was 26, I bought a donut shop franchise. And it was pretty funny because everyone told me it wouldn’t work, you don’t have the money, you don’t have the credit, you don’t have the experience. Those are the three things you need to get an SBA loan. Even my professor, I was getting my MBA at the time, and my entrepreneurship professor was like, “Oh, Carina, 99% or some over 90% of SBA loans don’t get approved. So I don’t know what you’re thinking.” And so I spent two months on my business plan, and this was back when you would look in the paper, right?

So I found an ad for this donut shop for sale in the paper. And I remember talking to my mom and I said, “Are they going to think I’m crazy? I’m going to call him.” I’m only 26, I have no idea what I’m doing. Anyway, I set up an appointment. And so my mom and I went in and talked to them and I ended up writing my business plan, got an SBA loan, and bought the place. And it was funny because when I told my professor, he actually invited me to be on his panel after that. He was so impressed that I got the SBA loan, that he had me evaluate people that were graduating with their MBAs and give them advice on their semester long business plan that they had worked on. So actually turn the tables on him. I think it blows mind that I had actually got an SBA loan.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love your story though, about being a little kid going door to door. And I would love it because I did the same thing at the same age, except-

Carina Hatton:

That is funny.

Melinda Wittstock:

… mine was selling tickets to my show, which I put air quotes around. I mean, I think it involved my gymnastics and some of my ballet, like my soundtrack.

Carina Hatton:

Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve never been much of a performer. I was always kind of the numbers person.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so funny though, right? Like how this shows up. Right? So there are a lot of entrepreneurs that just have it in the DNA, right? And usually we have entrepreneurial parents and whatnot. There’s something there that gives us this intuitive. I don’t know what it is. It’s in the DNA. And I’ve always been curious about, to what extent can this become learned? And I think it can, but there’s sometimes some just psychological blocks or mindset blocks or whatever that you need to get out of the way. And so getting back to your coaching, I mean, how much of this really is ultimately a mindset battle? Being able to be coachable, being able to know your own value, not knowing

Carina Hatton:

Oh my gosh.

Melinda Wittstock:

… one of mindset issues. I could just go on.

Carina Hatton:

I would say being coachable is the make it or break it. I think that first you find a good coach, if you want to do it. If you really have the passion for it, you find a good coach, and then you do what they say, because the ones that have been in my program in the past, they’ve all given up on themselves by now. But the ones that didn’t make it are the ones that didn’t do the work. They somehow questioned everything along the way. And I don’t know if it was fear, lack of belief in themself. The most successful ladies that I’ve got in my program are the ones that they feel the fear and do it anyway. They want it bad enough to just put their head down and follow the instructions, right? To follow the path.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m laughing because our board chairman at Podopolo, my podcasting company, has this really funny phrase, it’s you can be right or you can be rich.

Carina Hatton:

Exactly. Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Which one would you prefer?

Carina Hatton:

I mean, I feel like if I would’ve had a coach back when I first started my boutique, I would have gone so far so much faster, right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh gosh, 100%. I think of all my media and tech companies, same thing. Right? But you learn over the time, and I think the best entrepreneurs are hyper curious and really good learners because you need to be. I mean, there’s so much stuff that’s beyond your control, there’s so much stuff that you’re learning as you go on the journey, and you can’t possibly have all the answers to begin. Entrepreneurship in and of itself is an iterative process, like being in a lab with a whole bunch of experiments going on until you get them right. Yeah? It’s such a huge, huge part of this. And of course, you grew and scaled your own, because you have a love of fashion, so Knitted Belle Boutique. And how long did it take you to get to that kind of seven figure level in your own boutique?

Carina Hatton:

It took me a year and a half to get to six figures. After that, it took by the next year, I had hit seven, once I figured out what worked and put the gas on it. And what was funny is I didn’t even realize I had done seven figures. I was so busy working.

Melinda Wittstock:

You didn’t have a party.

Carina Hatton:

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s funny because I have a lady in my program, and I said, “Oh my gosh, you hit… She did it for $5,000 in one week, a few months ago, and I said, “Hey, congrats.” And she was like, “Oh, I didn’t even realize I did that.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s normal.”

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, how funny? Wow, amazing. There’s so much that we could talk about here, but this has been amazing. And Carina, I want to invite you to hop on over on Podopolo. It’s a very unique listening app that’s interactive, which means that we can keep the conversation going further over there. So if you come and join us, we’ll add you-

Carina Hatton:

Sure.

Melinda Wittstock:

… as the guest on the podcast, which means that everybody can find you that way. And if they have any questions for you, we can just keep this going, because it’s awesome. And in the meantime, I want to make sure that everybody knows where to find you and work with you.

Carina Hatton:

Yeah. So right now, you can find me at onlineboutiquecoaching.com. And that’s my latest and greatest of what I’m working on right now. And I also have a Facebook group and a Facebook page that I hope you’ll share with them. So yeah. Yeah, we have fun. We have fun, we make money. It’s an awesome community of ladies, and we work with each other. It’s not competitive. We all lift each other up. So it’s a really, really fun program.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love that. We say on this podcast often it’s named Wings because it’s all about lifting as we climb. So when we’re really supporting each other as women in business, magic happens. And so that’s amazing that you’re doing that. And of course, we’ll have all the information in the show notes. So if you’re listening right now and driving, whatever, don’t drive off the road, it will all be there and on Podopolo too. And Carina, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us.

Carina Hatton:

Thank you so much for having me.