Poetic Gangster talk about how they used Instagram to grow their dropshipping business with Shopify.

Could you tell us about your background and what the Poetic Gangster sells?

Poetic Gangster is a street style clothing brand selling tees, crops, hoodies, leggings and sweaters. We run our business from Melbourne, Australia but our products are printed and shipped from California.

My sister and I were always passionate about starting a business together one day. I had experience and qualifications in eCommerce and Graphic Design and my sister’s passion was fashion so it seemed natural to open an online clothing store.

At the time I was working in Digital Marketing at a software company and my sister was in hospitality and freelanced as a personal stylist on the side.

How do you find your products?

We kind of did things backwards. I discovered Shopify and dropshipping then we came up with the brand name Poetic Gangster. My sister felt there was a gap in the market for street style clothing and that she could do something different. I found Printful which integrates with Shopify. Printful products range from hoodies, t-shirts, sweaters, bags, basically anything you can print on!

Where did your first sales come from?

Our first sales came from friends of friends who noticed us on Facebook. Word of mouth has been huge but we’re now seeing traffic and sales come from our blog which we have recently focused on.

What do you love about running an eCommerce store?

We love the freedom of making our own decisions in our own business and that we can run our business from anywhere in the world. I also love creating written content which is one of my passions.

What are some of the challenges you have faced?

On page SEO, traffic and patience have been the big ones. It’s taken a few goes of changing our metadata and page titles to get things right. Taking turns updating the blog can be challenging when things get busy. Patience has been difficult too as eCommerce is I think a long term game. You’re often testing, posting, uploading and waiting for results and algorithms to kick in.

Which Shopify apps do you use? Which are the most important to your business?

Printful is or most important app because they’re our dropshipper. We also use Sales Pop and Mailchimp.

What are you working towards now?

We’re hoping to do more photoshoots, collections and possibly expanding to kids clothing.

Where can we learn more?

Check out Poetic Gangster here: https://poeticgangster.com/