AndrewChia.com

Source:  Reader’s Digest

Highlights

1.  Jimmy Choo first named his shoes Lucky Shoes in 1984.  It wasn’t very lucky.  A few months later he tried James Shoes.  In 1986, he was inspired by a fellow designer to use his own name.

2.  “I’m proud to see the Jimmy Choo name around the world.  Nobody can take away ‘Jimmy Choo’ from me.”

3.  “I was charging 30 pounds for a pair of shoes and people still thought it was too expensive.  When I started to make a name for myself, I looked at the price of the shoes in magazines and I decided I had to sell my shoes for the same price or slightly above.  In high-end fashion, the pricing is important because it influences the client’s mind and how they see your product.”

Today he charges at least $1,000 for a pair of his shoes.

4.  Is the client always King?  “You have to respect what you stand for.  In my case, it’s elegant, feminine shoes.  I’ve had clients ask me for this and that, but I’ve told them, I’m Jimmy Choo and this is what I do.  I think you’ve got to stick to what you’re good at.”

5.  What is your key to personal success?  “You must work hard and never say tomorrow – finish the work today.”

6.  Do you have regrets?  “The only thing I regret is that I didn’t get enough education myself early on.”

Comments

1.  Names are very important.  If you are an enterpreneur you must take extra care and effort to give your product a great name.

Marketing is a subject that enterpreneurs must study.  But sadly, most enterpreneurs are not aware of this.  There are laws of marketing which must be obeyed.  They are violated at the enterpreneur’s own risk.

Business is war, they say.  Remember those ancient generals (usually Chinese ones) holding some kind of book or manual in their hands.  Think Kuan Kung.   Don’t you think it strange?  Generals are supposed to be fighting, not reading.

Awareness is only the first step.  The bigger problem is that at least 80% of the books about marketing are not really helpful!  (It even obeys the 80:20 Rule.)  Now you begin see the gravity of the problem.  There lies the root cause of most business failure.

One of the most important aspects of marketing is branding; the most important component being the name.  A name is likened to a hanger which the product or business hangs itself to.  It is like a piece of dress being hung up for display.  Without the hanger, the dress would be lying on the floor where no one can see it.  Customers will not be able to find the product.

Let me illustrate.  I overheard a friend asking this, “Wow, that’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing.  Where did you buy it from?”  “Oh, I bought it at Times Square Third Floor.  Sorry, I can’t tell you exactly which shop because I can’t pronounce the name.”  Imagine how much more business the enterpreneur would have done had he made his name just pronounceable so that his customers can find him.

Try this experiment yourself; go to Sungei Wang or Times Square and walk around the fashion shops and you will find a lot of names (shops and products) that you can’t pronounce.

But businessmen succeed anyway!  Berkshire Hathaway is such a terrible name (one simple reason is that it is too long) but it belongs to the world’s richest man.  BMW is alphabet soup.  So are IBM and KFC.  Alphabet soup is a no-no in branding.  Imagine if your company’s name is XYZ.  A week later your first-time customer may have difficulty remembering whether it is XZY or YZX or ZYX.  Get my point?

Thinking is difficult work.  We often see enterpreneurs using up a thousand calories of brain juice trying to figure out a name for the company or product.  That is why we see alphabet soup everywhere.  That is when they simply gave up.

But enterpreneurs succeed anyway, regardless.  I have personally seen small businesses operating without names and raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.  Simply because they do, others tend to think that a name is not important.  What they don’t realise is that in business, as in life, there are always exceptions.  Most of the time, names like these don’t work.

Sportsmen who excel are usually not good at studies, and vice versa.  But our Nicol David is good at her studies; she’s very intelligent.  And she’s the longest reigning No. 1 squash player in the world.  Malaysians and Asians alike are so proud of her.  She’s my Malaysian Idol.

Remember, if you think you are happy to have made $1 million in sales with a name like XYZ, you would have made at least $2 million had you given your product a proper name.  XYZ is not a name.  Neither is ABC.

2.  Pricing is another very difficult issue for most enterpreneurs, as we have seen in Jimmy Choo’s example.  The million-dollar question is always, “How do you price your product competitively in the market?”  Or, “How do you price your product higher than your competitors and still capture the market?”

Ponder on how Jimmy Choo got it right.  He priced his product against his competitors.  Most enterpreneurs get it wrong when they price it so that it could be affordable to his customers, which is a very natural thing to do.  IMHO, as long as they keep doing that they would remain poor.

Failure in getting pricing right often results in business failure.

Without the passion for his shoes and the hunger for success, Jimmy Choo would have easily become another casualty in the business world.  He recovered from two mistakes in naming his product.  And he recovered from a fatal error in pricing his product.

Most people do not realise where they went wrong.  They will never find out.  When they do find out, it takes strength and courage to overcome their mistakes.