Nina Patel and Jake Burton are your average, middle of the road British couple living in one of the better parts of south London. Like most young people working in the capital, making a living isn’t easy during the best of times, let alone during a pandemic.
Their little apartment in Lewisham was rather cosy, one bedroom and a little balcony with drooping plants; with all that a young couple could need. Except maybe an air fryer, but that was put on hold when Nina was made redundant from her job as an air hostess for British Airways.
Pandemics always hit some people harder than others, and Nina and Jake were hit harder than most. They were reeling from the impact of Nina’s lost income when Jake was furloughed — theatre agencies don’t need quite as many staff when theatres are closed, turns out. For no fault of their own, the couple were left stranded. Surviving on less than one income, when they were previously cruising on two, is not an enviable task. There are bills to file, rents to pay. All on a tiny income
Filing gas, electricity and rent payments is an annoyance most of the time, but what would Jake and Nina give to put “annoyance” at the top of their problems list when it came to bills. With one job lost and the other surviving by the skin of its teeth, there was a little problem. How to pay the exorbitant amount that is a South London rent, all without any current means of doing so?
The government, for once, offered a bit of help with their law that prevented landlords from kicking out tenants for non payment for three months. It’s temporary relief, but relief nonetheless.
With the immediate danger of being evicted out of the way, the couple could actually think of the future and how to get out of their hole. Help was to come from the most unlikely of sources — the usually annoying ads that you find on the fringes of websites, advertising something called “Dropship”.
Desperate times calls for desperate measures, anything is worth a shot when you have nothing to lose. Even a poorly made ad on a dodgy clothing website, found by Nina on one of her weekly window shopping sessions. Going against everything she’d taught herself not to do, Nina clicked the link. For once, she actually read the page without clicking off the instant it loaded.
The link wasn’t much help, surprise surprise, but it opened up a whole new world to explore. Dropship, supply chain, traffic light model, free shipping, XDP. All the buzzwords that she’d take pains to avoid a week ago were flowing in her mind, and that of Jake when they had their daily chat over dinner. If there’s a valid excuse to break their “don’t talk shop at the table” rule, it’s this.
Needless to say Jake and Nina didn’t get much sleep that night, opting to go on a research all nighter then sink into their bed and wake up sad in the morning. They found out what dropship means and what they can do with it. They realised that there are a huge number of dropship suppliers in the UK, and indeed the world, so it’s difficult to stand out. Cue another minor bout of sadness, until Nina’s bulb switched on. Bespoke furniture.
Working as an air hostess has plenty of pros and plenty of cons. Long hours, average pay, dealing with crying babies for long stretches without having the option of leaving the room. But also visiting new places, meeting new people, experiencing the slow osmosis of different ideas that is a side effect of travelling to far flung places every week. Nina had picked up more than a bit of knowledge about foreign cultures in her half a decade in the industry. This was the perfect time to cash in and make up for all those hours spent in the presence of children with no concept of ‘personal space’.
With Jake’s art knowledge – working in a theatre agency, you can’t not be passionate about art – and Nina’s grasp of what different people want in the goods they buy, they set out to separate themselves from the crowd of dropshippers in every corner of the internet. They were going to design and make their own, bespoke furniture and dropship them. The result was to be an indictment of their design skills and grasp of what people want — and their decision to dump every iota of free time on this project. Float or sink, it was in their hands alone.
Now came the hard work. To transition from being regular employees with their stable salaries and simple, risk free lives — to being essentially self employed with their futures in their hands. They had to know what type of furniture they wanted to sell, and market it well enough that the revenues keep them afloat.
3 months. That’s all the time they had to get their business up and running. Racing against time is something you really don’t want to do, but — again — desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s a wonder how inspiring prospective homelessness can be.
They set to work, designing, drawing and finalising their products. Nina had noticed that the most inoffensive design style proved the most popular, across all the many, many different passengers she served. This was the contemporary Scandinavian kind with it’s smooth edges, light shades and minimalistic approach. So they put their own twist on it, making the colours more bold and adding copper and brass to the normally subdued whites and greys of Scandinavian furniture. Who’d have thought that those boring conversations with flyers while you’re pouring them coffee would come in remotely handy?
Nina provided the inspiration and Jake drew up progressively better models to send to dropshipping companies. Now, regular dropshipping is easy to get into but harder to gain a living through. Bespoke dropshipping is much more difficult to get into, but once you’re in it’s a smooth journey to consistent products if you’ve got the right products. Nina and Jake knew this well — the right dropshipper is half the battle won, especially when it comes to bespoke products with no minimum quantities. And free shipping. The amount of dropshippers that offer these two facilities are absolutely minuscule, but that also means that they’re the best in the business.
After a few long days of intense googling, talking to people on dropship forums and finding the name of dropshippers that supply the most popular products on home decor websites, they finally had their first choice. With a bit of luck, maybe they’d have their dropship business up and running with all of their own products — and their own copyright!
Jake’s nightly slog sessions were worth it after all — the designs were accepted with only minor changes. Takes two to tango, though, and Nina’s ideas were the base that propelled them towards owning their own website with drop shipped products. You wouldn’t believe the scenes when the acceptance letter arrived. The neighbours could, though.
All that was left to do (besides pop a bottle of champagne) was to set up a business account on eBay and OnBuy; probably a good idea considering how difficult running a website is. So they saved that for later and proceeded to integrate their e-commerce accounts with the dropshipper, so that every order placed gets sent directly to the customers’ doorstep.
Marketing turned out to be easy, turns out attracting people to a theatre in this day and age is a rather difficult job and the skills Jake picked up at his old agency were handy. A few social media accounts with consistent posting, a sprinkling of paid ads and good old fashioned word of mouth — nothing too difficult to achieve for a couple that practically lived on the internet, especially in lockdown.
Jake and Nina didn’t have a particularly technical background, but that didn’t matter cause they had the design skills to create a good product, and the work ethic to maintain a business. Working long hours in their old jobs helped with that.
They played to their strengths and spent their energies on marketing and product design, leaving the shipping, packaging and storage to the dropshipper. That’s the beauty of dropship — emphasising your advantages while passing your weaknesses onto professionals. Jake and Nina are a living advertisement of what the model can achieve. Just ask the new air fryer in their apartment.
