12/18/2023 0 Comments Caitlyn minimalist los angeles caKate: We’ve had a few “viral” moments that have certainly helped us with our momentum. Today we have about 30 employees total and are about to move into an even bigger office in September. We outgrew working from our home workshop back in late 2017 and had to get an office. We hired our first employee in 2016 - a college student who helped with customer service. Michael: It got to the point where we were like, Okay, I think it’s time that we actually start hiring people, and really trusting the procedures that we’ve implemented. Literally everybody in the family is involved in this business. Michael’s sister helped us with customer service. At first, I would model, and my sister would be the hand model and my mom would be the photographer. My mom and dad watched the kids and packed jewelry. Like Michael said, we used to do everything by ourselves. Kate: The biggest lesson: Know how to delegate. Since then, we’ve had two more kids, but we’ve had a lot more help along the way. We were frantically trying to get everything to the post office before we headed to the hospital. Kate was having contractions, but she was determined to keep packing her jewelry. When we had our first son, in 2015, he was born a few days before Black Friday. Juggling family and work life has been a pretty big challenge. Michael Kim: For the first two years, it was mostly me and Kate doing all of the front-end stuff. My husband, Michael, quit his job and started working with me full time. My sister Vivian then took over Silver Handwriting and still runs it today. So I rebranded to Caitlyn Minimalist in 2014 and got a professional camera. With the amount of people coming to me to share their stories, I thought, I can do better than this. I don’t think I took very good photos, but even with my bad job of branding, the demand was still there. My first shop was called Silver Handwriting, and it was solely focused on handwriting jewelry. Also I wasn’t very tech-savvy in 2013, and Etsy is user-friendly. Back then, Etsy was probably the only platform that offered that connection. The jewelry that I create has a story behind it, so my relationship with my customers is very important. Kate: Custom and personalized items are really a thing on Etsy, so I thought it was the best fit for me. I can make affordable and meaningful jewelry that everybody can enjoy. I realized, I can make something out of this. So that’s when I decided to start my business. One seller I admired back then was offering one for around $300. I went online and saw that there are not many options out there, like literally nobody sold handwriting necklaces, and custom jewelry is very expensive. After that, more of my friends started asking me for custom jewelry. I did it for free the amount of joy and comfort that it gave her was priceless. She wanted her late father’s handwriting of the word love replicated for a necklace. In 2013, a friend asked me to make something for her that was similar to a piece I’d created with my grandfather’s handwriting. Sometimes, I would create something personal for myself. We moved from Vietnam to America in 2012, and our first workshop was in Little Saigon in Orange County, California, where we live. Kate Kim: My family has always been involved in jewelry. Here, she and her husband, Michael, who quit his job to help her full time, walk us through how they reached such a huge milestone. This spring, the brand reached 1 million sales - a rare achievement for any seller. Kim estimates her returning-customer rate is about 40 percent, and she sees between 60 and 100 percent overall growth year over year. Since 2013, she has been selling custom, hyperpersonal accessories through her Etsy shop, Caitlyn Minimalist: necklaces featuring the handwriting of a relative who passed, rings with newborn babies’ fingerprints, friendship bracelets with secret messages - the kind of stuff you buy to commemorate a special person or occasion and then buy again when you have something else to celebrate. It’s not unusual for jewelry designer Kate Kim’s pieces to bring customers to tears.
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