Building a business is hard work. It takes passion and perseverance, and business challenges pop up that you never anticipated. But solving those thorny problems is often one of the most fun and satisfying parts of running a business, mostly when you work with a team you love.
When Brandon Kruse and Amanda Halpin-Kruse first met, Amanda worked as a nurse and ran a small online fashion boutique called Discount Divas on the side. She had launched her online business, and she had adequate inventory. Still, her online boutique didn’t gain much traction until she had the idea to start selling directly to her friends and followers on Facebook using a social media sales tactic called comment selling.
Amanda & Brandon Kruse
Leslie Brown – Weave A Dream Photography
Shoppers would tune into live streams where Amanda demonstrated the products and then type “Sold” in the comments thread to purchase. The shift to live selling on social media was vital for Amanda, and her business quickly took off.
Amanda’s business was rooted in the idea of women serving women. She knew her customers and needed to find a place to connect with them. That place proved to be Facebook, and Amanda quickly realized she needed to hire staff to support her business.
Brandon, then Amanda’s boyfriend, was a software engineer with an entrepreneurial spirit. After seeing Amanda’s issues as she grew Discount Divas, he wanted to help her solve those challenges and began building technology to address specific problems.
That process eventually led Brandon to build a live-selling platform—CommentSold—that would make shopping for clothing from Discount Divas and other small and medium-sized businesses like it much easier and more enjoyable. Based in Alabama, the company has now grown into a billion-dollar business serving more than 6,000 retailers.
Amanda and Brandon also got married along the way, proving an excellent team in both business and life.
A significant proportion of CommentSold’s retail partners are women who have a large and loyal customer base who tune into live stream selling sessions weekly or even more often. Part of the appeal for customers is being able to interact online in real-time with their favorite hosts—it’s entertaining and engaging in a way that traditional live selling channels like QVC and HSN just can’t replicate.
One exciting thing that the CommentSold team has noticed is that many of the most successful women retailers on the platform have spouses who have left their own jobs to help support their wives’ lucrative retail businesses.
Brandon’s top tips for making this type of business relationship work include:
1. Be open to new ways of thinking
Amanda hadn’t considered live selling on social media at first, and Brandon hadn’t been working on technology for retail when Amanda’s business started growing rapidly. Both of them were willing to shift gears, innovate and work together for the good of the business—and their open-mindedness paid off.
2. Your spouse is your trusted partner
When business gets hairy, and you find and yourself overloaded, it makes sense to turn to your spouse for help. Spouses are typically already great teammates who are used to working together when they need to solve problems. This dynamic explains why so many men are leaving their jobs to support their partners’ CommentSold-powered retail businesses.
3. Barriers to enter the market are low
With the internet and the increase in online sales, entry barriers for a new retail business have never been lower. Technology tools and platforms make it simpler to successfully grow an e-commerce-centric business today, so if you dream of launching your venture, do your research and then follow that dream.
4. Listen to what your customers want
Amanda was successful because she listened to her customers and knew what they wanted and how they wanted to shop. Her knowledge and experience as an entrepreneur spurred the idea for CommentSold, and now thousands of other women are using the platform to grow their own businesses.
The bottom line is when you work as a team and think beyond traditional business models, the results can be excellent. Don’t let old ways of thinking hold you back, and have the courage to follow through on your best, most innovative ideas.
