Your Basket is Empty
Starting a business is one of the most exhilarating and humbling things you can do. At MOXON, we've been at it for over a decade and while we wouldn't change a thing, there are lessons we learned the hard way that we wish someone had told us at the start. Here are five of them.
In our early days, we sold to everyone. Dining tables to interior designers and architects, earrings to jewellery stores, notebooks to stationery shops, frames to galleries. If someone wanted to buy, we said yes.
The problem? We were spreading ourselves impossibly thin, trying to serve customers with completely different needs, tastes, and expectations. What we should have done from the start was decide on our dream customer and then make sure every single product we brought in was a perfect fit for them.
The maths is simple: fewer customers buying more of your products equals a more focused range, a clearer brand, and a much easier life. Depth over breadth, every time.
We've done a lot of tradeshows over the years. Some were electric, orders flying in, conversations buzzing. Others felt like crickets, only for leads to quietly convert months later. The difference was never the show itself. It was how prepared we were.
A successful tradeshow has three distinct phases:
Miss any one of these and you're leaving money on the table. The show is just the middle part.
The most valuable partnerships we've ever built started with a genuine conversation and a real connection with the founders. Brands want to work with people who actually understand their product, not just someone who wants to shift units.
But the flip side is equally true. If your gut is screaming at you about someone, listen to it. We've had partnerships that looked great on paper and turned out to be anything but. Saying no at the start would have saved a lot of aggro, but that's a story for another day.
Build relationships with people you respect and who respect what you're building. Everything else follows.
We've had customers tell us about fantastic products they refuse to stock, not because the product isn't good, but because the ordering process with the designer is a headache. That's a sobering thing to hear.
Product-based businesses need to be service businesses too. The experience of working with you, ordering, reordering, communication, fulfilment, is part of the product. If it's painful, people will find an easier alternative.
This is something we at MOXON are still working on. It's not glamorous, but getting your processes and systems right is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for long-term growth.
Over ten years, we've been offered a lot. Products, opportunities, partnerships, collaborations. In the early days, we said yes to almost everything. Try it, test it, see how it lands.
Ten years on, we're older, have more children, less energy, and less time. Which means every decision we make needs to be getting us closer to our vision, not further from it. Clarity is everything.
Saying no is a skill. It gets easier with practice. And the more clearly you know what you're building, the easier it becomes to recognise what doesn't belong in it.
That's enough for now, but if you enjoyed this let us know if you'd like a Part 2 featuring our biggest mistakes. There are plenty to choose from.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
