Donde la Kathy is an online business that sells beauty, cosmetics, and personal care products. The business started at the peak of the pandemic. The business consists of the sale of various brands via catalog. Some of these brands are Natura, Yist, Viogrin, Leonisa etc. Due to the good marketing skills the owner of this business demonstrated during the first year of operating, today there are a lot of other brands that reach out to her to sell their products. 

What was your motivation for becoming an entrepreneur?

I live in Chile. In December 2019, there were protests here, various manifestations happened. This caused issues to my previous company and it couldn’t operate every day. Afterward, due to the pandemic, the company couldn't operate at all and this forced me to close that business. Since I was unemployed and it wasn’t the best period to start looking for a new job, I decided to start this business which would generate me income and help copy with the fixed expenses that I had. I am working alone. I do all the processes, from receiving the product from the suppliers and sending them to the customers. If there are days I am very busy or I cannot go out because of the quarantine, then I would hire someone to deliver the products to the customers. 

How do you advertise your products and services?

I am using Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. I am preparing a website, but it is not functional yet. The most useful tool for me until now has been WhatsApp where I publish the products and promotions. I have earned many clients in this way and then they order again. I must say that I live in a neighborhood that offers a lot of opportunities to sell your products. I started first to sell to my friends and close neighbors and then I could expand in a wider area.

How do you stand out from other competitors in the market?

There are other people that do the same business as me and even sell the same brands, but what I do to differentiate is maintain stock. I invest a lot in products so that I can deliver a product to my customers as soon as they order the products. My competitors usually work based on orders, meaning that when the customer orders a product, then they order the product from the brand, wait for it to arrive and finally deliver it to the customers. This process takes some time. I always keep stock so that I can deliver to my customers. This fact makes me stand out from the competition. 

What is your business goal for the next 5 years?

My idea is to create a website that will facilitate the advertisement of the products and the orders, so I don’t have to do this manually on WhatsApp. I have some brands that are multilevel too. My idea is to increase the number of brands I collaborate with and keep expanding. 

How many hours a week did you work when you started the business? 

I can't say a fixed number. I worked from Monday to Sunday, from 9 AM until later in the evening. Whenever a friend or customer needed a product for themselves or as a gift, I was always ready to deliver the products. There have been occasions when I have been delivering items until 11 PM. It is actually a very prolonged schedule I don’t have a fixed schedule like 9-5, but whenever the customer asks for the product, I must send it to them, or they will come and pick it up in my home. 

What is a characteristic of your personality that you consider the most important to have success in this business?

I am an easy-going person, sympathetic and this has made me have a lot of friends who also share the word with their friends. I get on well with people, they remember my name. Now, it isn’t so necessary to publish the product because my loyal customers will ask by themselves if I have a certain product or not. Or my loyal customers advertise my business to their friends. 

This has helped me a lot: to have good relationships with people and be memorable. 

How did you learn first about Loyverse?

I started using Loyverse in 2020. I had more and more products, and it was becoming really tiring for me to make all the calculations of stock manually in excel. I also forgot to add something, which caused miscalculations and errors that I couldn’t traceback. I found Loyverse online and started to test how it worked, and it solved a thousand problems because it is super simple and efficient. I could easily track the stock of my items, enter sales, manage the customer base, see how many items I had left in stock and I loved all these features. I tested other point of sale systems as well, but all of them became very complicated. 

What feature of Loyverse is the most useful for your business?

I like the inventory management and I also pay for the Advanced Inventory add-on. I like the option to add customers and have a Loyalty program for them. In addition, I like very much that I can manage my customer base, have their information saved and check their purchase history at any moment. Another feature that I like is the option to create a product and if it comes in different sizes or colors, I can add variants to have the items organized. In my opinion, the system is very complete. I like the Back Office, the visualization of the sales in the reports. 

What message do you want to give to the Loyverse team?

I want to thank you first for the support. Each time I have contacted the support team, they have been very friendly and explained in detail the answers to my questions. The help is always very rapid, it is very easy to follow the instructions that you give. I am very happy with the service.