In Blog 269 I Talked about building a Shopify site. In this blog I am going to talk about Doggydaddyshop.com is born

There is so much to creating a great website. There are many ways to go about doing it as well. There is one thing that must be dialed though and that’s your product. In previous blogs I’ve talked about how important it is to build a great team. Well since I’m a team of one so far, I think I have that one nailed. At least so far. Another important lesson I learned is that product is king. If you don’t have product that people want, it doesn’t matter what else you do.

Another piece is to have a website that is easy to find what you are looking for. So many times, I’ve searched for items and had a hard time finding what I was looking for. One site, I was looking for a warm jacket since I’ve gained a few covid pounds. I did a search for “warm Jacket” and sleeping bags showed up? Someone needs to work on taxonomy lol. For the last few months, I’ve been putting together a site called Doggy Daddy. It’s a site where people can find products with dog images on them with over 100 breeds to choose from and growing. I acquired the URL https://doggydaddyshop.com and have a trademark in the works.

I started building the site with the free theme called “Dawn”. It was a nice basic site and allowed me to understand the inner workings of a Shopify site. Actually it was probably good enough to just stay with but curiosity got the best of me so I did an upgrade with infinite scrolling which I like and a marquee which will scroll all the different breeds I carry. I love the way Shopify sets the sections up to make it easier to break down certain areas of your site. I have the new arrivals first after the marquee and then the top categories and featured product which I change every week. I have some more categories I’m developing after that then it goes to two featured collections. Socksmith is the only branded product I carry so far and Doggy Daddy as its own brand with exclusive product.

As you keep scrolling down I have a section on my inspiration, my Mini Poodle Teddy, with a few “Teddy items”. And towards the bottom I end the page with my blogs I write each week. I started with my love for dogs, then blog two starts with My dog Teddy and finally the third one is about Australian Cattle Dogs. In starting this site, it has been interesting to me to learn about the breeds as I create product. Since I’m so passionate about mentoring and coaching people what better way to share my learnings of the different breeds I come across. It is so funny too because I can be in casual conversation with someone about their dog and I feel I have so much information about their dog to share.

I love unique product. Probably why I enjoyed doing Private Label for 6 years at Zappos. I found an artist I just love. He is an amazing pencil artist, and his name is Gary Tymon. He works out of the United Kingdom and has amazing graphics. I have his work on coffee mugs and notebooks so far but plan to expand the collection soon.

I found another Artist from Romania at Mimoza Studios that have unique graphics perfect for black t-shirts and some realistic watercolors I plan to use this week. On top of these two I have been using other artists I’ve found on Etsy and Creative Fabrica. The best part of this adventure is it makes people smile. That is so rewarding to me. Once I get this site going and learn more about driving traffic to the site I plan to convert this site a little and add a shop for merchandise here too. I’m debating on keeping this one a pure blog and adding a separate site utilizing Solemanstudios.net which I also own. To be continued…