Secret Reign
Secret Reign LLC is an online retail company I opened in the early days of the Covid crisis. My expectation was that Covid would be a brief concern and that people would need clothes to go out in once the pandemic was over. Unfortunately I am not very good at predicting the course of world-wide health disasters, and it’s gone on much longer than I expected. I am very good at creating brands, gathering assets for those brands, marketing them and selling products.
I decided to focus on a underserved niche, gothic clothing. In order to compete against major retailers like Amazon and Walmart, common wisdom is that you must focus on a niche outside the mainstream. I decided on the goth niche as I’d noticed that there are a whole lot of goths. Go to any high school or college and there is always a small group of goth kids. Add them all up and there are over several million in the US alone. Using targeted marketing techniques and I only spent money marketing directly to them and no one else.
Secret Reign is my first foray into online retail. This provided many challenges. I am used to the marketing aspect of running a business. But dealing with a supply chain and needing to be in constant contact with suppliers on the other side of the planet was new to me.
The company uses both drop-shipping and print-on-demand to fullfill orders. Orders that originate in the USA are directly fulfilled via airmail from factories in Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Eastern Europe, Turkey, and the USA. There is generally no USA middleman warehouse which reduces cost.
All design of the Secret Reign website as well as its communications, were designed exclusively by me. To clarify, product photography and stock photography were either provided by the manufacturer or something I sourced and bought, respectively. Some project description texts were generated by an artificial intelligence I rented, though edited by me. Secret Reign was otherwise a one-man operation.
Secret Reign LLC is currently for sale. Use the contact link above to inquire.
Mobile-First
Secret Reign was the first site I built for my own business purposes that used the edict of mobile-first design. Web designers hate mobile-first, in my experience. I understand, they went from a canvas that could fill your entire field of view, a large monitor or TV, to a canvas that fits in the palm of your hand. It gets cramped. The last two web designers I worked with would say things like, “Screw this! The site was beautiful and will always look the same, they can just zoom in and scroll around on their stupid phone.”
Web marketers on the other hand love mobile-first. The reason love it is we look down the aisle while riding the train and see every single person staring into their phone. We go on dates and see other couples not talking to one another, too shy to connect, staring into their phones. We see people trying to cross the street, nearly or actually getting hit by cars, staring into their phones. When they are staring into their phones they are buying things.
I created Secret Reign to be at it’s best on a phone. Each page displays provocative graphics and makes the buying experience fast and easy. A clear funnel between discovery and final purchase. With follow-up email designed to increase repeat business.