POJO makes a name for itself

PAULINE Lee started her Mandurah home-based business, POJO Kids, in July 2008, in part for the extra income it would provide and also because it gave her an opportunity to work while being with her two daughters.

POJO Kids offers unique personalised children’s products such as bags, placemats, books, CDs and DVDs. The child’s name can be printed onto a bag, into the story of a widely available book, or spoken in personalised storybook CDs.

Mrs Lee is the licensed Western Australian agent and distributor of the products and uses copyrighted software on her laptop to burn CDs and DVDs for customers, while also printing label covers.

The software gives her the ability to recreate the particular story CD or DVD every time she gets an order, usually by phone or from her website.

“This business was an affordable entry level into the children’s marketplace to gain brand awareness with fabulous fun, educational and unique products to use as a springboard to launch POJO’s own products in the coming months and years,” Mrs Lee told WA Business News.

“I want my daughters to have positive experiences with me as a mum and as a businesswoman, growing up sharing the journey with me in a positive way – learning first-hand that you can have fun in the workplace, creativity, and bring that joy to other families who purchase personalised products.”

However, Mrs Lee soon discovered the difficulties in operating a home-based business, with sales very slow in the first 12 months through lack of brand awareness.

“Originally bringing this idea out to the market was my interesting challenge,” she said.

“The word ‘personalised’ was my downfall in terms of market understanding and recognition because as these products are relatively new, consumers thought we just wrote a name on the music CD label and that meant ‘personalised’.

“This couldn’t be further from the reality; to personalise the music CD we burn the child’s name right through the CD, in some music CDs it sings their name over 80 times.

“Then we type a personalised special message on the label and the child goes home with an absolutely unique personalised product.”

Using her three- and seven-year-old children to test products, and their schools as focus groups, Mrs Lee knew there was a market for POJO products, but she needed to educate the market in order to generate sales.

“I knew I had to overcome this by educating shoppers, otherwise my business would stagnate or even worse, fold,” she said.

“I didn’t sell great numbers in the early days on my website.

“Advertising campaigns in children’s publications were expensive but not successful for me.

“I had to turn this around, and being a new business, costs are monitored on an almost-daily basis, so catching the problem early was vital. The key to understanding this is the reason for my success today.”

To overcome this, Mrs Lee “hit the road” to demonstrate the product, by attending product shows, fetes, festivals, exhibitions, and school fundraising events, while also attending networking groups with the Small Business Development Corporation and the local Peel Chamber of Commerce & Industry.

“In fact, any event I could physically get to where children and parents would be, I’d go,” she said.

“I’ve also been heavily involved in fundraising for many local causes with the fundraising arm of POJO Kids.

“POJO products are a unique and extremely successful fundraising option for schools, kindergartens, and toy libraries, because it is a turnkey process and the work is done by POJO not the overworked and underpaid volunteers,” Mrs Lee said.

With brand and product awareness now “fabulous”, her website has led a significant increase in sales and customer traffic, particularly repeat customers.

In the past five months, POJO Kids generated the same turnover as the business’s first year of operation.