In 2011, Tori Gerbig was still working in her insurance job, earning only $25,000 a year.

At the age of 24, she was fond of surfing the internet in search of trendy and affordable clothes, and unfortunately there weren't many options at the time, which led her to consider starting a women's clothing business on eBay.

According to Tori, it was just a fun hobby and she did not know that after 10 years she would be busy all day working on the “Pink Lily” website, which specializes in selling women’s clothing, as its profits last year only from the field of online clothing amounted to 141 million dollars in total sales. Today, the number of her followers on social media has reached 3 million and 600 followers.

In an article she wrote herself, published by the American website CNBC, Toure told how she achieved this resounding success.

Sales of $141 million

Tori notes that in order to launch her own eBay store, she and her husband, Chris, made an initial investment of about $300 to purchase clothing and accessories from a wholesale site. Unfamiliar with pricing strategies, she priced items according to her point of view, and she worked and her husband from the living room;

So there was nothing to worry about except for shipping costs.

Profits varied over the first few years, but their income was usually between $300 and $1,000 a month, which they used to pay off student loans and invested back into the business.

The writer says that she has been traveling to Los Angeles to meet with sellers and place orders for products, and recently she has been attending trade fairs to expand her selection.

Two years later, in 2013, she created a personal Facebook group to market her clothes, and she had good clients who showed a growing demand for her products, especially in her local community in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

By the end of the year, she had saved $20,000 of her earnings, which she used to launch the official website for Pink Lily, which really helped her business thrive.

She adds that in May 2014, the store's profits exceeded $100,000, and after 3 years running Pink Lilly as a side business, she quit her insurance job to work for her trading company, where her husband Chris joined her a few months later to oversee the company's finances and operations. At the end of the year, their revenues exceeded $4 million.

In 2019, after earning $70 million in total sales, Tory says she received an investment offer for a minority stake, which helped her fuel the rapid growth of her business, expand her product offerings, and hire an impressive team.

Currently, more than 11,000 products are sold on her site daily, not to mention she has set up a store with 250 full-time employees, and notes that while she still visits trade fairs, she has managed to build a core group of vendor partners to create templates for her company.

Here are her top tips for starting a successful business:

Find a gap in the market

It is very important to find a gap in the current market, when I found out that fashionistas who wanted to find a dress for $50 or less could not find what they wanted, I thought of filling that need.

Reinvest your profits

If you want to achieve rapid growth, you need to reinvest all or most of your first profits from your business, which can lead to severe financial hardship for the first few years, noting that she worked about 60 hours a week, and followed the policy of Spend austerity, in order to reinvest the money earned from the site "Pink Lily".

Find fun ways to promote

As Tori explains, your social media activity is an essential part of your success. She organizes regular Instagram surveys to investigate customer needs, posts pictures of some of the products she's considering buying or brands she can partner with, and then uses Followers' reactions and comments to make final decisions, indicating that this step helps in integrating shoppers and involving them in the decision-making process.

Tori says she ships the products in custom bags with the company's logo on, then shows photos of customers posting a picture of themselves in their new clothes on Instagram, as well as tagging her website.

Customers are brand ambassadors

The writer notes that she has always encouraged entrepreneurs to think carefully about how they choose their brand ambassador;

At Pink Lilly, it was offering a paid jobs program - with a commission of up to 10% upfront on each sale - to an exclusive group of old customers who could provide positive testimonials about the quality of their products, and this is an important and sustainable part of its marketing strategy, which contributed to achieving Sales of $7.5 million last year.

be unique

Torey concludes her advice by emphasizing the need to select a product line that can be owned exclusively in your company, as the complete inventory must be purchased from any seller - for example - so that no other retailer can access it, and in this way, you can single-handedly sell a product that is not available In the market.