Hello and welcome to The H Word
If this is your first time with us, please look forward to amazing products, great sales and hair advice for all hair types.
If you’ve visited us here before or if you’re here from our newsletter, then you may have noticed that there have been a few changes.
We’ve been planning an overhaul for a while now and this year – The Year of Great Hair 2022 – we made it happen.
It was a long process but all worth it as the goal in mind was to provide you, our customers (and future customers), with premium quality products in beautiful reusable packaging through an easy ordering process.
From shutting down our website to travelling all the way to the Mother City; it was an interesting journey. Of course, not everything went to plan, there were many ups and many downs and many, many compromises.
Under guidance from our investor partner we implemented the following changes:
It began with new packaging. Instead of padded envelopes we are now packaging your stylish items in sleek shipper boxes from Impress, that can be repurposed for other uses. Go ahead and keep the tissue paper as well – you never know when you may need it to make that R10 gift look R5 more expensive.
In May we shutdown our website in order to change website managers and build a completely new website. We had originally planned on only shutting down on the 1st of June but in order to avoid extra costs and at the behest of our new website developer, we took the website down early.
This greatly impacted our sales as our website is the main channel through which we sell our items. We officially sold our last items in May. This means that, as of August 1st, we had been shutdown for two and a half months – a waking terror for any small business.
Yes we were terrified!
We had so many meetings where the opening and ending conversations were affirmations of,
“Yes we can do this.”
“It’s going to be okay”
“It will be fine. Fine. It’s going to work out”
“Wooosaaahhh”
To digress;
The new website needed a new look.
To achieve this new look we commissioned a professional photoshoot and travelled all the way to the Mother City.
Getting to Cape Town was a huge dilemma. We had a tiny budget and many expenses. With the cost of plane tickets and petrol, most of our remaining budget would’ve gone towards our travelling expenses.
Cue FlySafair’s R8 sale.
Yes, there were really entire tickets going for only R8.
It was crazy! We were on our devices for the entire day waiting in the online queue. And then, around 18:00, after the sale had finished, we got through! It took seconds to find one of the last sale tickets and book it. Fingers had never flown across a keyboard so fast.
The final amount came to R125 – so much cheaper than the original estimate of R4000.
At this point we weren’t sure where we would be sleeping or what our final schedules would look like.
Of course the day of the photo shoot didn’t go exactly to plan.
We drove around for 30 minutes looking for the AirBnB and, consequently, we were late. The venue wasn’t exactly what we wanted – we had missed the window on our ideal location. This venue was much smaller than we had envisioned. It was raining, too, which we thought would affect the lighting in the photos.
Miraculously it stopped raining for the exact amount of hours we needed for the shoot. The venue turned out to have an excellent bathroom and our awesome photographer, Anthea Adams, even sourced props for us and kept the upbeat mood going for the entire photoshoot. Look out for behind-the-scenes clips and photos on our social media.
It only took a few weeks to receive the finished photos and we were well impressed. Let us know what you think on our socials.
And then we sent them to our website developer to use in our brand new, sparkly website designed by Fezile Moyana.
We were not expecting to be very involved in the process as that had not been the experience we had had with our previous website manager. We were glad that this time it was more of a collaboration and there was greater freedom to express what we wanted.
We are very happy with it but, of course, it is you who will use it. Please let us know if there is anything we can improve on or change to make your experience even better.
You may have noticed that we no longer stock our denim travel bags. This is because we have struggled to find a strong, good quality denim that will last. We will continue our search and will, hopefully, have something new for you soon.
If you have any suggestions for us on what products you would like to see please let us know in the comment box or contact box or leave a message for us on our social media.
Once again, we would like to thank our partners who have helped bring a new iteration of The H Word to you:
Vuyolwethu Dubese of Innovtel – for instilling within us a ‘Can Do’ attitude and also cash.
Karen Esbagh – for manufacturing our gorgeous products.
Lerato Baartman of LaserSky – for her digital marketing and social media expertise.
FlySafair – for that crazy R8 sale on their tickets.
Anthea Adams of Blossom Marketing and her assistant Kristen – for the amazing photos and positive photoshoot experience.
Fezile Moyana – for the website of our dreams.
Impress – for affordable packaging that can be used time and time again.
The Hendricks family – for opening their home and feeding us.
And last, but not least,
Thank you to our patient and untiring family and friends for their love and support.
Now go forth and buy our stuff.
5
I aⲣpreciate, cause I discovered just what I used to
be taking a look for. You have ended my four day lengthy hunt!
God Bless yoս man. Hɑve a niсe day. Bye
Nwabisa
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