Starting a Business: The Birth of a Brand
At Brand Monkey, we’ve been working with businesses for a long time. Whether they’re seasoned professionals or starting a business from scratch, we’ve helped turn their branding efforts into gold with our expertise and guidance. Our speciality is Amazon. Advertising, planning and effectively navigating the pain points so brands can promote their products successfully.
It’s because of these pain points and our love for building brands that we decided to set about creating our own. It’s all very well us saying we know what we’re doing, but why not put it into practice? An experiment, if you will, by starting a business and sharing the ups, downs and expectations, whether successful or not. This was a great opportunity for us to share what’s possible on a limited budget, using not just Amazon but Shopify, Veeqo and social media as well to test our theories and share the results. With that said, it was time for us to start planning!
Starting a business
The best place to start is always with research. We analysed several categories on Amazon we thought would be best to venture into. Ones that would be exciting and suit our personalities. We knew we wanted this to be an FBA business, so began looking at items we could get delivered directly from the supplier to the Amazon warehouse. Low start up costs were also key so that we could demonstrate what can be achieved on limited budgets and overheads. With these things in mind, we actually began by looking at homewares and storage. Flatpack storage boxes seemed a viable option and easy for us to brand.
That was until our research showed current shipment costs from China. They were looking increasingly high and rather unreliable in the current climate. After reviewing several ideas in homewares and storage, we decided to reset and take a different route by digging deeper into our love for food, something the WHOLE team were keen on.
We formed a list of the things we enjoyed – coffee, wine and spirits, snacks, cooking ingredients like oils and seasonings. There were many more but there was one thing that stood out. Sauces and condiments.
And just like that, the conversations soon started about the type of sauce we like.
Finding our hot sauce
After a little more research and discussions aplenty, we found a local hot sauce supplier that fit all our logistical requirements (as well as our taste buds!). They could offer white label production at a low cost, as well as being able to send products directly to the Amazon warehouse, saving us storage and postage fees. As they were a family-run business with similar ideals to ours, we felt we could be a great team, and it wasn’t long before the supplier was just as excited about our project as we were. We were really hooked in by their eagerness to be involved and were able to offer our expertise in other areas of their own business. Building a strong and trustworthy supplier relationship is a really important step. At the end of the day, without the product there is no brand.
Choosing our products
In order to finalise our decision, there was one thing left to do – the taste test. Our supplier had over 200 products to choose from, so we narrowed it down to 24 products to test, comprising of hot sauces, jams, purees and chutneys. In an interesting evening of yummy noises and a few tears, we then settled on seven delicious products. They not only tasted great, we also thought they would be some of the more popular searches on Amazon. When people are looking for spicy sauces, customers know chillies like the Scotch Bonnet, the Carolina Reaper and of course the Jalapeno. We liked a lot of the sauces and jams on offer, but knew we wanted to start small and be clever in our decision-making so that we could maximise our SEO further down the line. By keeping our range small to begin with, it also meant there was room for growth. Quality over quantity, as they say!
Finding our brand name
Settling on 4 sauces and 3 jams, our next task was coming up with a brand name. If you own a business, you’ll know this is probably one of the most difficult tasks. You want to be memorable, you don’t want to be too generic, but you also don’t want to have to explain your brand name because it’s confusing. We knew we wanted to have our iconic monkey involved in the branding somewhere, but did we want it to be so obvious? Would people look at it and say, it’s chilli sauce…why the monkey?
We each came up with a number of options and said Ip Dip Doo.
No, not really. After a lot of umm-ing and ah-ing over 20+ names, we managed to cut it down to a shortlist of three; Mr Chimp, Funky Monkey and Jackanapes. We thought we could have one of these as our umbrella brand name, then label each of the products individually based on their content.
Instead of relying on our own opinions, we decided to take it to the public. We each conducted a poll across social media to discover which was the favourite and why. It seemed a close call to start with, but ultimately, Jackanapes came out on top. Lots of people found it fun to say, memorable and less generic than the others. Some pointed out that there were already brands with similar names to Mr Chimp and Funky Monkey. That would mean our competition SEO-wise would be higher and it could also cause issues with trademarking.
So why Jackanapes? Well, aside from one of the owners being called Jack, the definition speaks for itself…
The results
With the poll concluded, we checked out Jackanapes and found there were only two uses of it as a name. One clothing brand, ‘Jackanapes Apparel’, based in Indonesia, and the other the name of a book. With so little competition, it was a clear winner.
And so, after trademarking the brand name, Jackanapes was born. We were starting a business and the future was looking exciting. Next up, branding.