How to differentiate a product in an online marketplace
Storytelling is the differentiation strategy used by EverPresent Giving, a company that makes and sells handcrafted, re-usable gift bags.
As a business owner, do you struggle with expressing what makes your business different from other businesses in the same space? And what makes your product different from the alternatives?
Vesna Hozjan is the owner of EverPresent Giving, and she insists her gift bags are not just gift bags. Here’s how she came up with the business idea, how she’s tackling the differentiation problem, and what’s she learned in her first year-and-a-bit in business.
A business is conceived with an idea
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring...
… except for an exhausted mother of two toddlers (one with special needs), who's desperate to sleep, but must get all these presents wrapped, by herself, before hitting the sack — so she can be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to host 19 people for dinner the next day.
The hassle, mess, and waste got Vesna down. (Getty Images)
From that Christmas Eve over a decade ago, Vesna Hozjan recalls the stress of having to wrap gifts for the whole family. It always seemed to be at the last minute. There were piles of paper and tape and ribbon and gifts bags. And then, the next morning, after the previous night’s efforts, all that stuff was strewn everywhere — and had to be tidied up before guests started to arrive. The ribbon had to be separated from the paper that could be recycled. And the recycling bin’s overflowing, and the foil paper couldn’t be recycled at all, and trying to keep the paper gift bags from getting crumpled under the weight of two hundred elephants… sorry, I mean two toddlers… so they could be re-used. Vesna felt resentful of the work — and the waste — at a time when she wanted to feel joyful and connected to her family.
When faced with a problem, Vesna has always been someone who tackles it head on and figures it out. Whether it’s helping to put a new roof on her family’s home when she was 12 years old, or if it’s the problem of time-consuming and wasteful gift wrapping.
“The work ethic my parents instilled in me has served me well. I don’t shy away from any task.”
But when Vesna was hit with a diagnosis of breast cancer the year after that ‘last straw’ Christmas, she had to rest — and taking it easy is far from easy for her.
“I had a bunch of big surgeries and I was supposed to rest. I’m typically really active, I like biking and skiing and running. I like it all.”
So she figured out a way to solve two problems at the same time — physically rest while working on solving a problem.
She asked her mother to show her how to sew gift bags that could be re-used over and over.
Vesna is the first to admit that the bags she made that year are not beautiful. They are basic pillowcase-shaped sacks, made with cheesy, cheap fabric. But they did the job.
“Wrapping took, start to finish, 40 minutes. And on Christmas morning, I just had to fold them and put them away in the box. I thought I had just discovered the biggest life hack ever.”
Her family has re-used them every Christmas for over a decade. They’re now one of her family traditions, in the same way that other families might always use the Christmas stockings that Great Grandma knitted or, like my own family, a tree decoration that Dad made years ago.*
The birth of a business and why a side hustle didn’t work
Vesna wanted to share this same ease and joy with other families, which is how EverPresent Giving came to be born.
“I’d been doing this myself for a decade and talking about starting a business selling them for that long. My friends would say, ‘Just start the — insert expletive — bag company!’ Because they were tired of hearing me talk about it,” she laughs.
She initially tried to do the business as a side hustle, but it didn’t work for her.
“First because there’s just so much to do. And, second, whenever I work for someone, I am very loyal. So even though I was doing my work for them during work hours, I almost felt like I was cheating. I get very emotionally invested. I’m either all in or I’m out. I also needed to see more progress and momentum in my business than I could by doing it on the side.”
Vesna worked with a business coach who helped her appreciate the virtue of being patient about growing her business.
“Working with a business coach helped me see that I needed to build a business that fits my life. Flexibility is essential. There are times when I need to be able to drop everything and attend to my special needs son. I need to build the business in a way that’s manageable for my life — and that will be different from someone else’s.”
To get her business off the ground, she hasn’t been afraid to invest in it: high quality product, excellent professional photography, business coaches, social media services, and so on. Her advice to other entrepreneurs would be to focus on what you do best and what only you can do, and — as much as you can — invest money into your business to pay for quality services that you can’t do as well.
Expect iterations — not perfection right off the bat
Vesna knew she wanted a product that was beautiful as well as practical — not the pillowcase-shaped sacks she was used to.
“I didn’t intend to sew myself at all. I worked with a design house in Vancouver. I paid a few hundred dollars for them to come up with a prototype. I thought I was going to take that prototype to a local factory and then have the bags made, and then I’d be done. But that’s not what happened at all.”
Vesna didn’t intend to do any sewing for her business. But that’s not how things worked out.
Having worked for a couple of software companies over the years, she was familiar with the idea of iteration, but hadn’t anticipated it with her gift bags. She discovered that what might seem to be ‘just a bag’ is really much more complex. There are a lot of details — how to get the top of the bag to flare open like a flower, instead of drooping. How big the base should be so it stands up just right. The ribbon, the lining, the thread, the tag… All represent details to be finessed over time. It took Vesna’s first year in business to perfect her product, based on feedback from her customers.
“I needed to figure out how to sew my own prototypes because I wasn’t going to pay a few hundred dollars each time I want a small change. Instead, I paid the design house to train me how to make my own bags. It took me at least twelve tries to get the flare at the top of the bag exactly right.”
But this has paid off.
“I know every single detail of my bags intimately. Now, when my sewing partners tell me about a problem, I know exactly what they’re talking about. And I am also so confident in the construction of my bags that when I’m talking with an outside vendor, I feel super-confident doing it. That confidence in my product really helps in sales.”
After 14 months in business, she’s now perfected her product. She knows it (literally and figuratively) inside out because she was hands-on in every step of its production. She’s now able to leave the sewing to her Winnipeg-based team.
"The Canadian Muslim Women’s Institute in Winnipeg trains refugees and other newcomers to Canada in industrial sewing. At the same time, the women fill a labour gap in labour in Canada."
Now, Vesna can focus more on growing her business.
Marketing lessons — storytelling
Vesna believes that stories from past Christmases, and other occasions, enrich our gift-giving experiences.
In the past, some people have been embarrassed to re-use gift bags, but Vesna has turned repeated use into a beloved feature of her bags. A tag attached to each bag tells a story: When it was used, who was the gift-giver, who was the recipient, and what was the present inside. When you wrap a video game console for your 16 year old’s Christmas present next year, you’d have a nostalgic reminder that, for his second Christmas, you gave him an enormous bright red fire truck. Do you remember how he squealed with excitement when he pulled that out of the bag?!
Stories are an integral part of her products — differentiating them from other gift bags on the market — and stories are also a key part of her marketing, differentiating her business from others. No other business has Vesna’s story. And only her gift bags tell her customers’ gift-giving stories.
Social media marketing to Vesna’s B2C customers has largely been through Instagram and Facebook, and it’s has been working well. She’s noticed that she gets good responses from posts that are personal and reveal some of the back story of her life and business.
“People want to see behind the scenes. They want to see what you’re working on.”
Vesna has a background in sales (in the printing industry and in a couple of software companies) and knows that — so long as you have an excellent product or service — sales is all about relationship building.
“You nurture and provide value. You show up, and you do what you say you’re going to do. I always made sure my clients had everything they needed. I looked at it like doing the right thing, and taking care of somebody, not really selling. And people would call me because they trusted me and they wanted to work with me. So long as you have a good product behind you — and I always have had — sales skills are really just people skills.”
People like to buy from other people — not an anonymous product, however beautiful, from a faceless company.
“I think it all falls flat if it’s just pretty photographs and I want you to buy this thing. I took a video marketing course and my videos have performed really well. Across the board, 100%, all my top videos have me in them.”
Vesna says the principles of relationship-building are the same whether you do in-person sales or e-commerce using social media marketing.
“It’s about being authentic and being vulnerable, and also asking people their opinion and showing them what you’re offering. When I do put myself out there and share a bit of myself, a bit of my story, the reaction is always so positive.”
Storytelling is how Vesna is showing customers how her bags are different from all the other gift bags on the market. Her own story — of that long ago, stressful Christmas Eve and her subsequent cancer diagnosis — and her customers’ stories. You might not think of them this way, but customer testimonials can be stories. A testimonial is a page from that customer’s life story.
One of Vesna’s customers, Brenda Booker, who owns a clothing and shoe retail store, expressed her relief and appreciation like this:
“After I got the gift bags, I didn’t have to think about wrapping, which is a big thing for me. I’m a business owner and I have limited time to begin with. So it was awesome — I could get the presents, put them in the bags, and put them under the tree. Voilà! It was all done! I didn’t have to worry about wrapping the stack of presents I’d have hidden in my closet until Christmas Eve. It was also fantastic to see how the bags enhanced our already beautiful Christmas tree. I really did appreciate that. On Christmas morning, I didn’t have the paper to pick up. I was very, very thankful for the lack of chaos on Christmas morning! One less thing for me to do!”
Most busy people can relate to that story. But Vesna also tells stories about families starting gift-giving traditions with new babies, or couples celebrating anniversaries, and lots of wedding stories! She says:
Giving and receiving presents are part of every family’s story.
“I’m touched when my customers share their stories with me. One of my customers said she bought a big, beautiful blanket as a wedding gift, and bought our jumbo bag to put it in. So the couple have the bag as part of the gift, to be re-used over and over as they go through their lives together.
Another story I love was also about a wedding gift. The matriarch of the family has this beautiful necklace with a pearl and a diamond and it’s been in the family for generations — and each of her daughters wore it on their wedding day. When the son was getting married, and they were welcoming a new daughter-in-law/sister-in-law into the family, they asked me to make a custom bag and make it shimmery on the outside and blue on the inside. They put the necklace inside and it was the ‘something borrowed’ and the beautiful bag was ‘something blue’.”
Growth and self-care
In her first year or so in business, Vesna has learned a lot.
“The entrepreneurial journey is not for the faint-hearted. There’s a frustration that every entrepreneur lives with — that you feel like you’ve never done enough, that you could always do more.”
So Vesna has started a different way of measuring daily progress, instead of checking tasks off her to-do list.
“I started time blocking. Because, at the end of the day, no matter how much I did I never felt like I did enough. Now, I might give myself an hour for some admin tasks, two hours to plan my social media, or whatever. And I focus during those two time blocks and make real progress. And when other things pop into my mind during that time — and I’m creative, so they always do — I just note them down and put them aside for another time.”
Managing her time, rather than thinking in terms of tasks to be done has had other benefits.
“Being an entrepreneur can be very isolating and I’ve found that difficult. I’ve had to really work social interaction into my days. And it sounds kind of corny, but self-care is so important. There have been times when I’ve been busy and I’ve stayed up late and I don’t take the time to exercise. And guess what? Three days later, hello meltdown. It’s important for me to make time to do yoga or go to a spin class or walk the dog. It can be hard to justify taking time off when you’re busy, but I need to be disciplined about doing it.”
Now the B2C side of things is ticking along and growing organically, the next stage of her business is to get more involved in B2B sales. She imagines businesses who are aligned with the same values — beauty, quality, sustainability, social responsibility — will want to use her bags for their corporate giving. For example,
“A developer who’s built a beautiful LEED certified building and is giving a gift to all the new home owners in the building. Using my bags would be an extension of their corporate philosophy. The home owners will think of that developer every time they go to re-use the bag in their home.”
Every couple, every friendship, every family, every business — they all have stories. Vesna’s gift bags preserve and share those stories for years to come — and, by reducing waste, simultaneously help preserve our planet.
* My husband made a Santa from a toilet roll tube, red construction paper, and cotton balls when he was in Grade 2. Unsurprisingly, our tradition includes hiding it in the deepest, darkest depths of the tree.