Once Upon A Briefcase - How quality leather goods brand, Gnome & Bow, sells globally from Singapore

Back when I was still working in banking, I needed a good quality briefcase for work. I was looking for something that wasn’t just functional, but also looked sharp with a unique design flair as well, so I tried to search through different stores for the perfect briefcase that would meet my needs.

Back then, one of my favorite brands was Paul Smith, so I was eyeing their briefcases, but with it being a designer brand, their stuff doesn’t come cheap. I couldn’t see myself spending SGD$900 on a briefcase, and found myself thinking “Hey, I can design a better one, and at a more affordable price”. So that’s how I first started thinking about entering the bag business. Prior to that, I already had a general interest in fashion, so this sudden thought of designing my own bags really got me thinking about jumping into the fashion industry full-time. So I would say it was more of my love for fashion that gave me the push to make this career switch.

RFID technology is very common these days, and can be found in things like our contactless credit cards and passports in the form of RFID chips. What these chips do is that they’re embedded into our cards and passports, and they contain our personal information. So what the RFID lining in our bags does is that it basically blocks out these radio wave frequencies and prevents people from stealing information from the cards and passports that are in our bags.

Yeah we have! For example, we have a collection that’s inspired by Gulliver’s Travels, which is all about the tiny and mighty details that really make a difference. One of them is the RFID lining that was previously mentioned, and the other more notable one is that the bags in this collection all come with an inbuilt slot for your SIM card and SIM card pin. This is so that when you travel and have to switch SIM cards, you’ll know exactly where to find your original one.

Another feature in this collection is what our customers like to call the secret compartment, which is a small, hidden compartment for things like coins and other loose items. More recently, we’ve been getting feedback from customers saying that it’s a great size for storing Apple AirTags, which is helpful in case they lose their bags or wallets.

The design process definitely varies from product to product, and even across collections. In Gnome & Bow’s early days, I think it took us about a year to a year and a half to go from the ideation stage to the final product launch. Because our designs are inspired by stories, every collection is like a new story. So what we do is we start to brainstorm for potential stories that we think would resonate with our customers, and then from there, we start to think about what kind of design elements we can add to help tell the story through our bags and wallets. And then finally, we’ll begin designing the actual product and testing it out to see whether it fits into our customers’ lifestyles, or meets their needs.

When it comes to solving design-related problems, we rely a lot on customer feedback. We try to ask them for their thoughts on our products, as well as what they hope to see from us via annual surveys. We also track whether they are having issues with quality, or whether the usability of our products is shortened because of certain stress points on the bag or the wallet, and then we try to enhance that in future iterations of our designs. Yeah, it’s really a lot of getting feedback from customers, and always going back to them and asking them what else they’re looking for that isn’t already available in other stores or brands.

I think there’s always a big debate on whether one should first focus on the local pool of customers, or go straight to targeting global customers and dive into a market that is more sizeable. Having dabbled in both, I think that first building up your brand locally is very important, because it really helps you to sort out the kinks that you have in a landscape that you’re more familiar with. So I would say if you’re just starting out, it’s good to focus on local customers for one or two years, but always keep your eyes on the global market.

When you start to expand overseas, other issues will begin to surface, especially when it comes to logistics and marketing, so it will definitely help to have solved other internal design-related issues beforehand. For us, we've explored both overseas distributorships, which involves a geographic partner covering a specific region or country, and wholesaling models, which involves selling in bulk to retailers at a discounted price so that they can still make a profit when selling our items at retail price.

The benefit of distributorships is that we can reach and sell our products to a large audience quickly by tapping on distributors' network, but the setbacks are that margins are low, and we would have to sell exclusively in that particular region or country. On the other hand, the benefit of wholesaling is that we can leave the marketing, sales, and order fulfillment responsibilities to the retailer, but the tradeoff is that margins are lower. Of course, with direct-to-consumer models, this would be the opposite. We have to do everything from marketing to fulfillment and post-purchase services like gathering feedback and handling defects.

That said, it can take quite a while to prepare to go global as a brand, and it might even take a few tries before success is achieved. For us, this is our second attempt at embarking on this Amazon Global Selling Journey, but I would say that now, as a brand, we’re more mature, and we know what it takes to grow on Amazon, particularly in the US.

One of the biggest game changers for Gnome & Bow now at least is having a dedicated account manager who really helps us and guides us along the way to make sure that we’re doing things right to avoid double work and delays on the logistics side of things. Our account manager also helps us with our ad spend and A+ Content, which is a premium content feature that allows sellers to change product descriptions of their branded Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) by using rich text and images, to make sure everything is at its best, and allowed us to put our best foot forward when we launched.

For every kind of business, whether it’s a brick and mortar, or an online store, marketing tools are very important. Some of the tools that we’re currently using are Sponsored Products, which utilizes keywords to help us convert our warm audience. This is very important, because ultimately, we really want to be able to convert as many customers, who are already wanting to buy our products at a low cost, as we can. Besides that, A+ Content is a tool that we value a lot, because our products are not homogenous commodities. We want to have the avenue and means to differentiate ourselves from other brands and products out there, so A+ Content really helps to establish Gnome & Bow as an original, quality designer bag and wallet brand. We’ve also just started exploring Amazon Vine, which is where trusted Amazon reviewers are invited to test out and leave reviews on new products.

Apart from these Amazon tools, we’re also looking forward to using affiliate marketing tools that will help us work with content creators to refer traffic and sales within Amazon. There are a lot more tools we would like to explore, but we are still at the infancy stage as an Amazon Global Seller, so perhaps in due time.

On the marketing side, Amazon.com, being a store with millions of US customers, helps us to have a captive audience of people who have purchasing power. This is especially helpful for small brands looking to break into the US, because when you’re far away in Singapore, for instance, trying to market to US customers is a lot harder, and would definitely require a lot more money and effort. So I would say the Amazon.com global store really brings brands closer to customers, and the insights available within help brands to further understand these customers. It’s almost like a business package I would say. Customers are trying to find something that you offer, and you’re trying to find someone that wants to buy your products at a particular price.

For Gnome & Bow, Amazon.com is currently our only sales channel in the US, but we’re very optimistic about it because of the opportunities offered and the way business is conducted in the store. In fact, one of our products listed on Amazon.com got more than a million views when we launched—the scale of the US is huge! Of course, we’re still a relatively new Amazon Global Seller, but we hope that our sales on the store can grow to become 50% of our total sales volume as a brand within the next year.

When Gnome & Bow first started out, we started with a small collection, and then as time grew, we increased the number of designs that we had because we thought that this would help us to boost revenue and gain more customers, and keep existing customers excited and engaged. But with that, a lot more costs are involved in terms of marketing and inventory management.

I think one of the biggest things that we learned from being on Amazon.com is how having a hero product and being focused in your branding is very important, because the 80-20 rule is real and applies to most, if not all businesses. Basically, what this means is that we see 80% of our revenue generated from 20% of our products. That being said, from a commercial point-of-view, it’s better to have fewer products, but sell more of them.

Wow, there’s a lot of them. I think the first is to not try to do everything alone. I’ve learnt the hard way that it’s always best to hire people who are better than you at certain things, like marketing or logistics, and to try to outsource work to agencies who are the experts as soon as possible, or as soon as you start making a profit. This really saves a lot of time and money in the long run. I know for many entrepreneurs, it’s very hard to outsource work in the beginning because most of us start off bootstrapped. Of course, if you’ve got a lot of funding and are just wondering where to spend your money, then that’s a different case. But either way, it’s one of the more important things to consider.

Besides that, I’ve also learnt that finding the right product-customer fit should be a top priority in the brand’s early years. This will really help entrepreneurs to gain focus on what you should be doing and what you should be saying no to. This is crucial, because opportunities will always come your way, so it’s important to know what to take on, and what to save your energy on, because this will make all the difference in the long run.

That’s a tough one. I think personally, if I could do it all over again, I would choose to gather some co-founders rather than starting and running the brand solo, because it’s really, really hard. Loneliness and stress aside, things get really tough when you only have one head. Two, or even three heads are definitely better than one, so if you can, and if you’re lucky enough to find like-minded individuals who have complementary skillsets, please work with them, because it will help you grow your business much quicker, and perhaps avoid mistakes that more pairs of eyes can spot.

On the creative versus business side of things, it’s quite hard to attain a perfect balance, especially when you’re a creative, because you tend not to think about things commercially. When I started, I thought I was doing a good job on the more technical business side, but now, 10 years into the business, I don’t think I balanced it well enough in hindsight. To tackle this, I would say the best advice that I can give is to put yourself out there and mingle with like-minded individuals who are also entrepreneurs, or who are more experienced in handling a business and learn from them. I think that’s very important. So if you have the opportunity to learn from people who have done it before, you’ll realize that it’s one of the best things that you can have.

In 2021, Gnome & Bow officially became a Made With Passion brand—this is a government-led initiative highlighting Singaporean brands that represent excellence, innovation and growth. This is something we’re really proud of, and it’s also benefitted us because since then, we’ve gotten multiple media features, collaborated with other local brands, and a saw a boost in sales opportunities.

As for how else we hope to grow, we firstly hope to grow our direct-to-consumer sales volume to 80% from its current 50%. To do so, our focus will definitely be on building a converting webstore that offers the best brand experience. Apart from that, we also aim to grow our business in the USA so that it makes up at least 50% of our total revenue.