How a Ukrainian woman sold bookmarks for almost 400 thousand dollars (10 photos)

One day, designer Elena Misnyk saw the legs of a doll that had fallen into it sticking out of a children’s book. She thought that this was the perfect bookmark, and today she has her own online store, myBOOKmark, and a workshop in Kyiv, which employs 20 people. Media around the world wrote about the unusual bookmarks, which Misnyk sold for almost $400,000. The girl told AIN.UA about how it all began.

Elena Misnyk is 31 years old. She was born and raised in the town of Korop, Chernigov region, in a house that stood right on the edge of the forest and inspired creativity. Since childhood, she loved to tinker, sewed, built tree houses and constantly disappeared into her father’s garage. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Kyiv National University of Civil Engineering and Architecture and tried to work in her specialty, but her love for the profession never awakened.

Then Elena decided to earn extra money through creativity. In 2011, she founded the Medova Shafa brand and began making ethnic-style jewelry. I sold them on Etsy and made pretty good money - about $1000 a month. “I still love the works of those times. I put a lot of myself into them. I think that’s why it was an unbearable torment to delegate production to craftsmen at later stages,” said Elena.

One day Misnyk was visiting friends who had small children. Elena looked into the nursery, where creative chaos reigned, and accidentally saw a book with doll legs sticking out of it. Her imagination immediately kicked in, and the very next day the girl made her first test bookmark from polymer clay and cardboard, decorating it with acrylic paints.

The designer tested the new product at her jewelry showcase, and although the target audience there was completely different, things worked out. I also tried Ebay, Amazon and Fancy, but the demand came from Etsy. “This was a ready-made traffic of foreign buyers who voted for successful experiments in dollars. Not the first test based on an existing store, but the first one that worked so quickly,” recalls Misnyk.

$2 to start

Not counting the cost of materials and labor time, Elena invested only $2 in starting a new business (Etsy charges a fee of 20 cents for listing one product on the display).

At first, the idea was appreciated by regulars of the jewelry store on Etsy, then the site administrators noticed the bookmarks and included them several times in their mailings. “We also actively took part in promotion within the Etsy site, thanks to which we often ended up on the first page,” says Elena.

The specificity of the product is such that it is not searched for. You can't look for something you don't already know about. So the main strategy was to simply show our crazy bookmarks to as many people as possible. And the possibilities of Etsy at that time provided us with such an opportunity.

Just two months after the first launch, in September 2011, Elena opened her own online store of unusual bookmarks.

A lot of traffic to myBOOKmark comes from social networks, where Misnyk products are quite popular. The brand has about 60,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram. Mostly from abroad. “We focused on markets where citizens have high purchasing power. The main countries are the USA and Great Britain,” says Elena. However, in general, bookmarks are sold in more than 90 countries around the world.

From time to time, Elena gives lectures on how to work on Amazon, Etsy and other marketplaces in order to successfully sell abroad

Since its launch, Misnyk has sold more than 15,000 bookmarks. They all cost $25, and the price has never changed. Thus, myBOOKmark's cash sales amounted to approximately $370,000.

Marketing

Previously, the main expense item for myBOOKmark was the work of craftsmen - all bookmarks were made by hand, and even the boxes in which they were sent to customers.

Now that the company has established a technological process, the largest costs are on materials and marketing. And marketing for this category of goods is quite unique.

For myBOOKmark, collaboration with opinion leaders works well. The company is friends with several dozen book bloggers who are happy to write about the product.

According to Elena’s observations, giveaway marketing does not work well to promote products like her bookmarks, but various activities in which participants must do something - post a thematic photo, come up with a riddle, etc. - work well.

Big team

At the start, Lena had only one craftswoman assistant, but she did all the interesting things herself. A month later the team already consisted of

three girls, including Misnyk herself, and today the myBOOKmark workshop in Kyiv employs 20 people. “I get scared when I think about it,” says Elena.

I looked for people through Facebook. “It was important for me that the team was loyal to my work. I didn’t look for artists or sculptors because I believed that almost every woman who has an inclination to work with her hands (sewing, knitting, embroidery) can do what is needed. And sculptors or artists will put too much of their own into each copy, which means that the client may receive something that is different from the photo,” Misnyk explained.

A business is, first of all, a reflection of its leader.

She considers the team one of the important components of her success. However, first of all, this is a unique product.

Of course, there were many who wanted to copy Elena’s bookmarks - there are about a dozen shops on Etsy with a similar product. They mostly adopt the general idea of a Ukrainian woman, but sometimes they copy models and even steal photos. Such competitors focus on lower prices. However, according to myBOOKmark, the copies are much inferior in quality and even look slightly comical.

Now the team is working on a fundamentally new product category, which will become an expansion of Elena’s business. However, the craftswoman has not yet said what it will be.