Live Case Study #3: How To Do DTC Branding (Fast)

Now, with two weeks in, I had:

A target audience: young women who also purchase products from Hydrojug.

A product: crossbody phone lanyard.

Perfect.

I felt that it was time to start building my Shopify store.

So that’s what I did. 

I got myself a brand new email address and signed up for Shopiy’s free trial.

Before I could actually start building the store, I need a few more things:

• Business name
• Brand colors
• Logo
  
  

To move fast, I used a business name generator to get some inspiration.

I wasn’t aiming for perfection. The only requirement was a name that sounds good and isn’t descriptive. If I don’t find success with my first product, I could easily sell a different product. Without changing the business name.

So I clicked through hundreds of randomly generated names. Any name that seemed “okay” to me was put on a list.

In the end, I had more than 50 names. Way too many.

So I picked my favorite three:

I continued with brand colors.

Same process as with the name: using a generator to get inspo.

On Coolors.co, I looked up the trending color palettes:

Since I was inspired by Hydrojug and plan to sell my product to a similar audience, I wanted to have a similar touch to my store.

Their colors were mainly black, white + lots of pastelles.

I ended up with this one:

I might need to add a few colors here and there, but overall, it looked great to me.

Now to the hard part. Logo creation.

Uff… I’m not a designer and felt that free logo generators wouldn’t do a great job.

But I gave it a shot anyway. And I was surprised.

Namecheap’s free logo generator is great.

All three names looked great with that font. That being said, I didn’t create a real logo.

I continued my journey with a simple font logo.

Back to Shopify.

First thing I wanted to do was to import my product into the store. So I installed an app called DSers which let’s me easily pick a product on AliExpress and make it available to buy in my store. Plus, it will fulfill the orders later down the road.

Next, I wanted to make some edits to the settings:

• Shipping zones.
• Payment gateways.
• Legal texts.
• Tax setup.
• Contact us page.
• About us page.
• Remove “powered by Shopify” from the footer.
• Favicon…
  
  

…and other smaller changes so I have a solid store setup.

As everything was getting more and more ready, I realized that it’s probably a good idea to have some of the products I want to sell at home. That way I can take custom product photos and answer product-related questions.

I ordered five products on Amazon to have them shipped very fast to me.

Everything was coming together nicely.

It is only a matter of weeks until my first sale…

Well, at least that’s what I hope.

Stay tuned until next week where I will take care of importing products and adding some amazing social proof.