Episode Details

Alright, it's time to get down to business.

Before I can take you along for the ride in this brand launch, I have to lay the baseline for explaining where we're starting from. There are two main aspects to this: the business side and the personal side.

This episode starts down the road of discussing the business side.

http://brandingblitz.com/2/Transcript:

Hello again and welcome back everyone! This is JR and you're listening to the Branding Blitz podcast where I'll take you behind the scenes as I go through the process of trying to strategically use speed and brute force to launch and scale a new brand.

I want to spend the next couple of episodes discussing where I'm at in the process of launching the brand as well as where I am at personally – both of which I think you'll find make this a fascinating story to follow.

For now, let's focus on the business side.

The past few weeks have been pretty intense for a number of reasons, not all positive. But from the aspect of launching this brand, things have been going great and very active.

About a week and a half ago, I ordered samples for our first product. Normally, if you don't already have a relationship with a manufacturer - which, let's face it, most of us don't - I would recommend ordering samples from several different manufacturers. Due to financial constraints I put more effort into weeding out manufacturers based on ease of communication, responsiveness, how knowledgeable they seem, and details pictures of the products... as well as price, minimum order quantities, lead time, etcetera.

I only ended up ordering samples from one manufacturer when it was all said and done. If you've got a little extra cash, I definitely recommend ordering more samples. It was more unnecessary stress waiting for the package to arrive wondering, “What if it gets here and it's not as high quality as they made it out to be?” The fact that the most important aspects of this particular product can't be judged based on a picture didn't really help. Often you'll have to pay $50 or so for a sample, which sounds like a lot initially – way more than the cost of the product itself. But when you consider it gets to your door in a few days from a factory in China, that's honestly not very much. And definitely worth getting a few of them coming so you can have a better basis for picking which manufacturer you work with.

That said, it actually worked out for me. I paid $60 for samples from one manufacturer, and I'm very happy with the quality of what we're going to be getting.

While I was waiting for those samples to come, I registered the business and got a Federal Tax ID number. If you're serious about doing this, I definitely recommend setting everything up separately under a business name and tax id rather than doing your own SSN. I'm not a tax expert by any means, but I think that will really save some headaches down the road when this things begins to scale.

I also registered a domain and began setting the website up. Whether or not you need a website right away really depends on what you're trying to sell – in a lot of cases I would say it's not a big deal. But for my particular market I really feel like having at least a basic informational site will be very helpful. I don't plan to have a store there yet. Eventually we'll set that up, but for now I want to have a laser focus on Amazon as our only sales channel. So I just log