Girl In Your Shirt: The cute, new face of small business?
GirlInYourShirt.com is making waves, small ones, but that’s enough for Jenaé, the Girl, to get by. And thats a business model we can’t ignore.
This election (as in most of recent years) the meme of ’small business’ was flung around quite a bit. Sometimes in reference to the struggling economy, sometimes in reference to the tax code, sometimes in reference to environmental policy, and always to let people know that politicians are looking out for the little guy.
Sad as I am to see it and to say it, there is a reason why american small businesses are failing. The little grocery down the street can’t compete with Wal-Mart’s prices. The independent record store can’t compete with the catalogue of iTunes. It seems like there’s no way the little guy can hack it these days. They can’t raise the capital and, if they do, they can’t compete with the prices and availability found elsewhere. They haven’t recognized that technologies exist which mesh beautifully with the small scale and flexibility of a small business.
For better or for worse, the internet has lowered the requirement for starting ones own business to almost nothing. This means that people will try to sell you anything and rip you off for everything. Some folks just buy up domains and throw up a weak-sauce site with some lame graphics and buggy shopping cart software and load it with everything I hate about the internet (I’m talking to you, spacer.gif) and call it a day.
The real sweet spot for small-scale e-commerce is the niche, the long-tail, the uncommon-enough-to-not-have-a-lot-of-competition-but-popular-enough-to-get-some-eyeballs business model. If you have a sweet idea and you put in the effort (read: not just money, but a personal investment of time) you can carve a nice little niche for yourself.
Jenaé Plymale has done just that with GirlInYourShirt.com. The concept is very simple: for $75 bucks, some cute girl will make a video wearing your company’s t-shirt. She’ll talk about what you do, who you are, she’ll even read a script if you really want to. Whatever you want, just no tank tops. She’ll show off the shirt and any other swag you send. She’ll feature the video on her site for the day, along with a brief explanation and some links. And, she’ll cross-post links to twitter, seesmic, 12 seconds, flickr, etc. And at the end of the day she’ll give away the swag. That’s it.
The immediate thought is “I could do that!” And that is totally the point: anyone could do it, but she did. And she does it well: she built a nice site, filled to bursting with every social media functionality Scoble could dream of. She really works it, too: she tweets often and will reply to almost any question very quickly. The tech crowd jumped in on it, snagged by the low price of very decent marketing. However, I was snagged by something else: the rooms she’s filming in. From the looks of things, she is a young 20-something, living at her parents’ house (totally speculating!) in rural Ohio, no less, who put in a few bucks (domain, host, maybe some design work?) and a lot of her time, and is eking out a nice little online existence.
And that is what small business is about. Everyone and their mom tries to open up a restaurant or an auto body shop or a bar, but very few will put all of their effort into making real an idea that no one else has come up with. It’s similar in concept to the Million Dollar Homepage but, you know, good. With staying power and appeal and a real personality behind it.
Such a business is entirely inspired by, and dependent upon, the near-frictionless-ness of the internet. It can’t really scale, unless she wants to make it Girls in your Shirts. The beauty of her idea, however, is that it doesn’t need to.
Kudos, Jenaé. And let your lesson not fall on deaf ears.
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