We run the Internet's largest marketplace for doll clothing patterns at Pixie Faire, featuring more than 50 indie designers, as well as online training courses on design, sewing, patternmaking, and craft business. We also sell our doll clothing and patterns under our brand Liberty Jane Clothing. My wife did extensive market research with our daughters! As most moms find out when their daughters reach six or seven, they get very fascinated with dolls, so we were introduced to the market through them. What gave us the opportunity though, is that my wife is an exceptional seamstress and designer. Her mom worked for a fashion house in LA as a cutter, and she grew up knowing how to sew at a professional level. So my wife started making dolls' clothes for our daughter, and she would go to dance classes and brownie troupe meetings and all the mums and daughters would say: "where did you get that?" and "how can I get it?" We started selling with an eBay store in early 2008 and began publishing the patterns about eighteen months later. My wife did extensive market research with our daughters! As most moms find out when their daughters reach six or seven, they get very fascinated with dolls, so we were introduced to the market through them. What gave us the opportunity though, is that my wife is an exceptional seamstress and designer. Her mom worked for a fashion house in LA as a cutter, and she grew up knowing how to sew at a professional level. So, my wife started making dolls' clothes for our daughter, and she would go to dance classes and brownie troupe meetings and all the mums and daughters would say: "where did you get that?" and "how can I get it?" We started selling with an eBay store in early 2008 and began publishing the patterns about eighteen months later. We were maxed out at $1000 per month and struggling to scale. We knew that digital goods were amazing products if they worked for your market. We also knew that sewing patterns have been around for a very long time! Because we already had our own sewing patterns, it was easy for us to try out selling them as downloadable PDFs. In the first month of trying out digital downloads, we gave away several hundred patterns for free and sold eleven. It was a humble start but scaled very quickly. This last month we had over 43,000 downloads, almost all through Sendowl. In total we've now had well over 700,000 patterns downloaded. It was a model that scaled very well. We began selling patterns under our own website, Liberty Jane Patterns, but when we started featuring other designers, we realized we had a branding problem. We relaunched the site a year and a half ago as Pixie Faire, which was a more general brand that many designers could publish under. It has become the Internet's largest marketplace for doll clothes patterns. A fun corner of the online universe! It's not a 'pure' marketplace though, because we have a store-level pricing strategy that everyone has to comply with. Similar to Kindle or iTunes, so there's no race to the bottom. In terms of approaching designers, we reach out to those we like, and we also get people who know about us and enquire. We now also have a third channel - training courses. The largest challenge for us is the delivery process. We started to scale the business with a WordPress website and various shopping cart and digital delivery tools, but something would always break. When you have 43,000 transactions in a month, bandwidth, the reliability of the hosting. and shopping cart functionality really matter. We left our WordPress platform and moved to Shopify and Send Owl. Shopify and Send Owl have solved so many headaches. We can't even tell you how many ways our sites used to break and the frustration we had before we changed to them. They just work. And it's a beautiful thing. The first marketing tool we actively worked on was YouTube. We started making videos about our work. When we started our daughter was our celebrity spokesgirl. She's since become a teenager and wants nothing to do with it! YouTube worked very well. Email marketing was the other channel we worked hard to grow. Now we have a list of almost 50,000. Then Facebook came on the scene, Pinterest, and Instagram. We also found that people wanted to use our patterns for their sew from home business. For the first six months, we said that our patterns couldn't be used for commercial purposes. But people kept asking, and we wondered why we were being such jerks! We flipped it around and created a Liberty Jane Partners Program. Now we have almost 1,600 people that use our patterns for sew from home purposes and we reach them through a newsletter and a blog. What software, tools and resources are crucial to your business? We build our content using various tools - Illustrator, Photoshop Elements for image works, and the basic document creation tools. There's no 'magic' tool. What I would say, however, is that I speak to so many people who have tried to create an ecommerce sales environment using the wrong platform and that's WordPress. In my experience it's simply not scalable and will blow up on you at the wrong time in the wrong way and you will be very frustrated. A. Based on the telling of this case, do you think they took the right strategy or not and why? B. Do you think it could be a good option to outsource production to a third party and why? C. Finally, which is the next step for this business, show me a future story of this case?