Selling our Kids Personalised T-shirt painting kits in John Lewis!
First day selling Personalised T-shirt painting kits in John Lewis with my Daughter
It was amazing finding out they wanted me and my Daughter Amelie to sell our Kids Personalised T-shirt painting kits in John Lewis!
When we were contacted about doing a pop up in John Lewis Brent Cross I was gobsmacked, less than a year ago we started our little business with the desire to share the joy we had found in creating personalised kids T-shirts together with other families in lockdown. I bought a little stock, and my husband helped me start up a website, my Brother helped create a logo, and even Felix modelled some vests we had tried ideas out on, everyone in the family played a part…We thought some local friends might want to buy some, but within a week we were distributing our children’s personalised T-shirt painting kits nationwide!
Just 8 months later we were being asked to sell our personalised T-shirt kits in my childhood shopping centre Brent Cross, in one of the biggest retailers in the country. This is NOT something I could ever ever have imagined happening as I scrabbled around picking and packing hundreds of orders last Christmas whilst my baby son slept! It was pretty mind blowing to be honest.
Our personalised T-shirt decorating kits had gone from a little hobby to help us through lockdown to a product a massive retailer was interested in stocking. Designing our own T-shirts had been something that had been so much fun it was mad to think our Personalised T-shirt painting kits, which Amelie had come up with the idea for, were recognised by John Lewis and although I knew that a lot of hard work was ahead, I was so excited to get cracking with this once in a lifetime experience.
Superhero, Dinosaur and Magical T-shirt painting kits
Deciding to go ahead with selling our Kids Personalised T-shirt painting kits in a store for the first time
This was not straightforward, as we are a small family business and the pop up was in the summer holidays, I had the kids to look after and none of my friends who could have helped me were available as they were all tied up with their children or on holiday. Everyone strongly recommended having two pairs of hands and legally I had to at least have someone cover my lunch breaks, and as I couldn’t rely on more than some guest appearances from my six year old co-worker daughter, I had to pay someone to help me as well as factoring in the rent, the VAT and the commission…which are things I don’t have to currently pay as a small online family store in my first year of business working from home!
It was a scary risk but I knew I had to grab the opportunity and just make it work, and I accepted that there was a chance I would end up paying for the chance to advertise and have amazing exposure rather than making any money. There were no guarantees on footfall or sales or what anyone would think of our kits, and it was the first chance to chat to customers properly face to face and get invaluable feedback. So the whole thing was super exciting and pretty terrifying at the same time!
There was no way I could consider not going ahead with selling our personalised kids T-shirt painting kits in this pop up - it had to happen, we needed to share our T-shirt decorating joy with other children!
The first day selling our Personalised T-shirt painting kits in a John Lewis store
On the first day I arrived with my daughter Amelie at 7.30 and we started putting together our set up - I had designed how I wanted it to look and measured things out at home, but without the specific fixtures and fittings available to me at my house I had to do a lot of guesswork and use my imagination to envisage how it would look. In my head it was great (!) but until it was all set out I had no idea of how it would come together.
Setting up our personalised T-shirt painting kit pop up in John Lewis
We were lucky enough to have a visual merchandiser work with us who helped me put all the personalised t shirt painting kits out and took Amelie to choose trousers, a hat and shoes for our Me-shirt mannequin - she, like every other member of John Lewis staff that we interacted with, was amazing, reassuring, helpful, warm, positive and excited about our offering. Although we were working independently of the rest of the staff in store, they welcomed us in and checked on us regularly so we didn’t feel like outsiders at all! Being allowed to dine in the Partners Dining Room as well was one of Amelie’s absolute highlights. I couldn’t believe that the alphabet letters fitted perfectly round the table too! It was meant to be.
Dealing with customers face to face for the first time
At 10am the store opened and the first customers started circulating…standing there wearing my Me-shirt branded T-shirt surrounded by our personalised t shirt painting kits with my Daughter Amelie wearing her favourite personalised T-shirt by my side I felt a burst of pride and adrenaline. How had this happened to our family?! I couldn’t quite believe actual real customers started coming to talk to us like it totally made sense for us to be in one of the UK’s biggest department stores!!!…and within 15 minutes we had made our first sale woo hoo!!! A personalised T-shirt painting kit for a unicorn loving girl ‘B’ who loved purple, a special gift from Grandma for the school holidays.
I had been wondering how I would manage with the very special art of dealing with customers, sussing out whether they want more info or to be left to browse, whether they are in a rush to buy, dealing with tantrumming kids or just desperate to grab school shoes and go but I started realising that I had done some of this before….at Waitrose Finchley Road on the cheese counter whilst at sixth form, in Ibiza as a ‘PR’ tasked with getting people to buy drinks in a Welsh pub, in Australia on my year travelling the world where I did door to door sales of a phone service…even my first foray into TV approaching people on the street asking them if they were single and fancied someone they had never told for a dodgy E4 dating programme…And after selling from behind a computer screen it was actually really lovely to be talking about what we have created, our story, our kits and getting such amazing reactions and compliments, let alone sales, from people genuinely excited to see us there and happy to have found something original to take home. I was bowled over by Amelie’s interactions with customers too and delighted for her to have such an amazing experience in her summer holidays. Selling Children’s personalised T-shirt painting kits she had come up with to real customers was not something anyone else was going to have to talk about at show and tell!
Changing the routine for the whole family - The juggle!
The week was totally exhausting of course, I had to have our shop staffed between 10 and 8pm and there were periods of time when hardly anyone seemed to be in the store and I couldn’t help thinking about how much my old lady back hurt and what the children were up to. It was a totally different set up for us as a family, with my husband taking on the kids and the house on his own as well as his demanding full time job and Felix doing full days at nursery for the first time and not seeing me apart from first thing. But to be honest it was refreshing and good for all of us, everyone did their little bit brilliantly, and with one of my famous call sheets in place to tell everyone where to be when and what to have with them we managed to survive! I was very pleased to see photos like this pop through from the nursery pick up and it was clear everyone was doing just fine without me…
Was it a worthwhile experience for our family business?
The week went by pretty quickly with us selling our personalised T-shirt painting kits steadily each day whilst having wonderful interactions with customers, gaining followers on Instagram and traffic peaking on our website daily. Don’t get me wrong, we did not make our millions, there were a lot of associated costs but we did manage to come out in the green and the experience was totally invaluable and I would definitely repeat again. (in fact we did go on to repeat it in Christmas 2022 and we doubled our sales and had another amazing experience) this time taking pencil case kits, slapband kits and a whole Christmas range of kids personalised fabric painting kits which went down well too.
Massive thank you to every single customer that came to chat to us and encouraged us with positive words and excitement about our idea and our set up, every friend that popped by to see us and told us how proud they were of us, and every person who shared details of our pop up with friends and on social media and virtually patted us on the back and cheered us on! It is a super special thing to know that there are so many people rooting for small businesses like ours and the warmth and love shown to us means more than you can imagine.
That our personalised T-shirt painting kits went down so well in a huge retail environment is just the most amazing thing for us- we brought T-shirt decorating to the masses in John Lewis and the kids coming past begging for a T-shirt kit of their own was super special to experience,
Me and Amelie selling our T-shirt painting kits together for the first time
SO WHAT DID WE SELL?….
TOP SELLING KIT THEME - MAGICAL CREATURES
TOP SELLING PARTY PACK THEME - JUNGLE
TOP SELLING SIZE - AGE 5-6
TOP SELLING INITIAL - A
TOP SELLING NEW PRODUCT - SLAPBAND KITS
