Today we’d like to introduce you to Manisha Patel. Them and their team share their story with us below:
While Manisha’s academics are in chemical and environmental engineering, she’s always held a great interest in entrepreneurship and business. Her time at Lamar University and Rice University allowed her various opportunities in e-commerce and digital marketing, which grew her interest to be a part of this space. Post-graduation, she began her professional career as a Process Engineer in the Oil & Gas industry. While this technical role opened exciting doors and incredible opportunities, a part of her was eager to gain industry experience on the business side.
At that time, she did not have direct access to helpful resources such as business courses, mentorship or tools. Therefore, to gain hands-on experience, she spent a-lot of my free time self-teaching through projects. Her first two shops were on Etsy, a third party marketplace that celebrates small business owners and local shops. It was through Etsy that she honed the foundation of digital media marketing, supply chain management, and running a successful shop. Through this experience, she created the idea and structure for my company, LuluCartoons.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
LuluCartoons is a custom art company that creates completely personalized hand-drawn portraits for their global customers. Like any business, the beginning stages to uproot the brand came with various challenges including honing in on their target market, utilizing SEO and Ads (primarily FB, IG, and Google) for optimized customer acquisition processes, and creating an efficient back-end system for order management and fulfillment.
However, these are all tasks which were acknowledged early on by the founders and are now streamlined. For example, because LuluCartoons creates custom art work, traditional fulfillment tools and processes were not easily adaptable for their company’s backend structure. Therefore, LuluCartoons built a fully custom-coded back-end system to automate the order creation and fulfillment process for the entire artistry, quality assurance, and customer support teams. Additionally, regardless of being founded during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (June 2020), LuluCartoons proved to be resilient by hitting various milestones its first year including fulfilling over 40,000 international orders, hiring a backend team of over 50 team members.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about LuluCartoons?
LuluCartoons creates custom cartoon portraits for our global artists through a passionate team of worldwide graphic designers and artists. Through our website, customers share their photos to create a fully customized art portrait that can be cherished forever and used to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and all the special occasions in one’s lifetime. Our 100% personalized portraits are possible through a passionate team of worldwide graphic designers and artists. The company’s deep focus on multiple channel marketing, customer service experience, and the order fulfillment chain are some of the key factors for the success of the company.
Contact Info:
- Email: mani@lulucartoons.com
- Website: https://lulucartoons.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lulucartoonsme/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LuluCartoonsMe/
