On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Tanya Mykhaylova. Tanya is the Director of E-Commerce for a designer lighting and home decor brand called Casa Di Luce. We talk about operating a managed marketplace, taking action and testing ideas in real-time, building custom features based on feedback, and so much more!
Tanya Mykhaylova is the Director of E-Commerce at Casa Di Luce, a premier designer lighting and home decor brand based in Toronto, Canada.
For two decades, Casa Di Luce has been a cornerstone of Toronto's design scene, embodying family values and entrepreneurial spirit. Operating multiple showrooms throughout the city, the company eventually established a firm presence in Toronto's design district by inaugurating a spacious flagship showroom.
Five years ago, Tanya made the decision to leave her corporate consulting job and join Casa Di Luce full-time, driven by a desire to leverage her expertise and propel her family business into the digital age. Tanya has adeptly stayed ahead of the latest e-commerce trends, guiding Casa Di Luce through the dynamic online marketplace to sustain growth and expansion.
Today, the company carries over 200 brands and ships to customers across North America.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Tanya Mykhaylova
If you're a brand looking to migrate or scale or potentially upgrade a system, definitely make a matrix of what your resources are, what the benefits and costs are of each platform.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today, I'm welcoming to show an amazing guest. She is the director of Ecommerce for a designer lighting and home decor brand called Casa Di Luce.
Tanya, welcome to the show.
Tanya Mykhaylova
Hi Chase. Thanks so much for having me.
Chase Clymer
I'm excited to chat. It's been a while we've been trying to do this. I believe we met at Shop Talk in Vegas.
Tanya Mykhaylova
Yep. Yep. Felt like ages ago. But at the same time, I still have follow up emails from that conference.
Chase Clymer
I met a lot of people there. And I always try to highlight it when I meet people outside of conferences because I think that conferences are a game changer for young entrepreneurs and young business people. Just get out there, meet people, you never know what's going to happen.
Tanya Mykhaylova
100%.
Chase Clymer
Awesome.
For those that aren't familiar with the brand, can you tell them what the types of products you guys are bringing to market, what you're selling online these days?
Tanya Mykhaylova
Yeah, for sure. So we carry primarily higher-end designer lighting products. We also have some accessories, furniture on the platform as well. But right now, we specialize in European lighting brands and then some American as well.
Chase Clymer
Gotcha. So would it be safe to say that it's more of a marketplace you guys don't manufacture and develop your own products?
Tanya Mykhaylova
Yeah, it's market style in the sense that we carry over 200 different brands on the platform. But it's not like anyone can sell on it. It's managed by us.
Some brands we have exclusivity with. Some brands we carry that our competitors do as well. So it presents its own challenges, for sure.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And I'm definitely going to ask more about those challenges there.
But just, I guess, take me back in time. How did you end up in this role as the Director of Ecommerce? Yeah.
Tanya Mykhaylova
So prior to this role, I was working at a consulting firm that specializes in building both apps and websites for large Fortune 500 companies. But we did end to end. So everything to do with the design thinking process, user testing, and then actually designing and building.
So I always had a passion for building things from scratch and ideating that whole process. And I always wanted to know what it would be like to own my own products, prioritizing features to roll out, constantly improving it.
It's a bit different than just kind of doing projects, you know, at the beginning and then never seeing that platform again. So that's kind of what led me to the role.
I've been in it about three years now and it's changed quite a bit, you know, during COVID times and now. That was kind of my path and it is a family business, so I always knew I wanted to join. I just wanted to make sure that I knew exactly what to do prior to coming into the role. So that was my path here.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, did you go out there and you're like, “I'm gonna go learn from these bigger companies that are doing more serious technical things and absorb as much as I can before going back and joining the family business?”
Tanya Mykhaylova
Yeah. No, that's honestly exactly what I did. I went to a traditional business school and a lot of my friends were going into big accounting finance firms. And I always knew that if I were to go into those, I wouldn't really equip myself with what I needed to learn.
So I kind of started to apply to tech firms, which wasn't the easiest thing to do out of business school, because I find that they don't really give you the tools to do that or the network for that. So I had to kind of go out on my own, find these primarily engineering, software development conferences. And that's how I landed in the company.
I chose one where I would be able to learn absolutely everything, start to finish about building a website, building an app. And yeah, that's what I chose.
Chase Clymer
Alright.
So you graduate college, you go join some consulting firms, you become a Swiss army knife, learn a whole bunch of things about a whole bunch of things. And then you decide to join the family business again.
Can you tell me about when you joined, what was the ecommerce experience like? What were you taking on as you established yourself at the company?
Tanya Mykhaylova
Yeah. So when I joined, the company was quite small. It did a little bit of Ecomm. It was built on a very old version of Magento. I think it only had around 500 products on the platform. Absolutely no marketing, none of that.
And I think the pivotal point was that... I don't know if you remember, but when Magento 2 came out, it was basically a whole thing where you had to either migrate or your whole website would start to stop working.
So at the time I joined, I was tasked with doing that right away and kind of deciding where to propel the company online, especially because at that time I think online sales accounted for 5%, maybe even less of total sales.
So yeah, that was kind of the start. And I had to dive in headfirst because we were kind of on a clock. I think we had at that time five months to migrate the whole website, which was a whole process in itself.
But that was stepping into the role and having no team, no developers to contact at the time, no agencies, nothing like that was definitely a learning experience.
Chase Clymer
So you mentioned that you had about 500 SKUs on an older version of Magento. How many SKUs did you have in the retail stores at that time?
Tanya Mykhaylova
Honestly, probably over 300,000. Something like that. So you got to keep in mind, every product comes in, like, five sizes and five colors. So that's already an exponentially large amount of SKUs. So yeah, it was quite a small website at the time and it didn't really know where near where it is today for sure.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. So the first project you tackled was this migration project. And that... I believe that happened in tandem with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tanya Mykhaylova
Yep. Honestly, probably not the best timing because I don't know if you remember, as soon as COVID started, everybody started doing home improvement things. Everyone started doing renovations. Everyone started kind of redoing their own, every part of their house because they were just at home.
And looking at the walls all day, realizing all the things that accumulated over years. So the timing could have been better. I feel like we were positioned, cause right now we're built on Shopify, but at the time we were positioned forEcomm and the site was bigger, I think it would have been a better time.
But no, It was a learning experience and we ended up migrating eventually. But that definitely was a tricky time. We had calls all day in the store. Magento was going down every 5 minutes for different reasons during the migration. And it wasn't a good time.
Chase Clymer
Now do you remember anything from that process of the migration that either you didn't expect to be that big of a deal, or just any other interesting tidbits of it to help other listeners out there that might be on an older legacy platform and what they should expect from a process like that, migrating a legacy brand to a more modern platform like Shopify.
Tanya Mykhaylova
For sure. I think the first thing you learn, if you ever take any UX design course, is the importance of failing fast and iterating. It makes sense when you learn it, but then it's much harder when you're in the position of having sunk costs.
It's much harder to come to the realization, “Hey, I know this isn't where we want to be and I know it's gonna be a loss, but we need to migrate off this platform.” And that's kind of what happened to us. We already invested quite a bit into migrating from one version of magenta to the next and it was really really tricky.
We didn't have the team equipped to develop all of these new features and we would build one feature, the next one would break because it would be incompatible with each other.
And I think my recommendation would be if you're a brand looking to migrate or scale or potentially upgrade a system, definitely make a matrix of what your resources are, what the benefits costs are of each platform, because sometimes shooting for the stars and not iterating and seeing what happens at every stage, it can cost you quite a bit in the end.
So it's better to catch things early to understand the downsides of taking certain routes and making the decision.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I know that the sunk cost fallacy is a huge thing when we're speaking with brands either about migration or about redesigns, especially these days, some people are on an older version of Shopify on a 1.0 theme, and should you invest in a 2.0 theme?
I'm telling everyone right now, do it. 2.0 is awesome. It makes your life so much easier.
But back to this project, once you got through the migration, did you get it done before the deadline within those 5 months? Or did you have to launch with an MVP? How did that work out?
Tanya Mykhaylova
So we launched Magento 2, I believe it was summer of 2021. Things were breaking every single day, apps were not compatible, we were working with a dev agency at the time and with Magento it's quite technical, so we needed a lot of people working on it.
And it was just the most frustrating thing and to come back, especially given that it's a family business and you've invested X amount into developing it, it was a really hard decision to just sit down and say, “Hey, you know what? This migration that we just did, we're going to have to do it all over again, but now to Shopify.”
But honestly, we're so happy that we did it. And yes, the timing could have been better, but at the same time, we wouldn't be where we are today if we didn't make that call. And who knows how much larger the costs would have been down the road.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
Share what you're allowed to share but from my perspective, one of the biggest reasons people migrate from Magento or a hosted solution to something like Shopify is that a lot of the things that break are just taken care of by the platform and the line item of services and having a retainer with a dev agency almost ceases to exist.
Was that true in your case? What can you say there?
Tanya Mykhaylova
I think in our case, what was happening is we had a lot of custom requirements. And having the PM background I did have, I had these lists of custom things that we verified with users and tested with that we knew we needed. And in Magento, to do something custom like that would have been extremely difficult, and it had to work with other apps and things like that.
It's funny because a lot of devs at the time were talking us out of the migration, they're saying, “Hey, well, Magento is so much more custom, you can achieve all these custom things that you want.”
But what they didn't talk about is that you just literally need someone 24-7 fixing bugs. With Shopify, it's like if anything ever comes down or breaks down, you could reach out to individual app supporters, they'll help fix whatever it is.
If it's a Shopify wide issue, their support is great. It all works together and we've never had, knock on wood, any emergencies with anything like that ever since. So I think yeah, the more custom, you really have to make sure you have a team that's able to support it. And most of the time, you don't even need what you think you need. You can make it a lot simpler.
Chase Clymer
That is something I always ask people. Custom is expensive. Everyone doesn't correlate those things together. And 9 times out of 10, you don't need custom. You just need it to work and your customers need something they're familiar with.
That's always a conversation. It's like, “Do you want it to be custom for the sake of being custom to make your ego feel good? Or do you want this thing to work the right way?” And those are always fun conversations.
So you made it over to Shopify. But still, the business was young in Ecommerce. Now that you have a stable platform, how did you start to drive more business that way and get more customers to the online store versus in-store?
Tanya Mykhaylova
So I think the coolest part of the transition was that we had multiple channels after we launched the new platform. So not only, yes, you're able to purchase a lot of products on the site, but we also launched a trade program, which was just a forum that a lot of designers, architects, builders came through.
And those requests would come through email and they would be really large quotations for hotel, residential, and hospitality projects. So that's just a new avenue that we haven't had before because in our physical store, only people can come in that are local. We now got requests from Vancouver, Calgary, all different parts of Canada and the US, which was super cool.
We essentially just overnight expanded our reach nationwide. Lots of designers would come through, they'll see that we carry maybe, certain products, but they don't see others on our site, we'd get requests asking if we can source brand X, brand Y. And that was definitely a big growth aspect of online.
But at the same time, I think because if somebody lives far away, they don't know the size of our website, they would come on and they think we're a wayfarer on IKEA and with that come its own challenges.
People wouldn't realize, you know, we're a smaller company. We can't reply in 3 seconds or take returns on absolutely everything. So that made it more complex in a lot of ways, I think.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
So I just want to reiterate what you just said to the listeners. So once you got onto Shopify, you built a form that was almost like a wholesale type situation, just to use some more simple terms.
Which before, you weren't experimenting with that at all but on the new site with these customers, these aren't your typical customers buying one or two lights. These are customers that are buying hundreds, if not thousands of units at a time for larger projects, which are the best customers, to be honest.
Maybe the margin isn't as good, but the gross is definitely there to make it worth the time. That was one of the bigger benefits of making sure you're adding the features your customers needed to this new Shopify store.
Tanya Mykhaylova
Yeah. We constantly ask, even now, it's part of our feedback loop. What designers would want to see, what would make their life easier.
For example, a good wishlist feature that can also be used as a quotation template online so that they could send us a list right away was just a completely new thing that we built out based on feedback.
And yeah, it's overall super cool because it's like an avenue that we never really even competed in. Our Ecomm channel, open that up for us. So, pretty cool.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, earlier, and we've consistently talked about it, that you carry a lot of other people's products. So for a marketplace-style company, how does the customer journey look like for you? What makes your marketing efforts different from a brand that's all about themselves?
Tanya Mykhaylova
Yeah, so it's really tough when you carry multiple brands, because even from a data perspective, the data inputs that we have from each manufacturer are completely different. So it makes rolling things out like AI on the site, recommender tools, really difficult just because of the nature of the data and the inconsistencies that happen in the back end.
So the journey, I mean, we recommend we have pretty solid email flows that go out for customers. So if they reach the website, we try to navigate and make it as easy as possible for customers to reach what they're looking for.
So in interior design, a big thing that people shop by is by room and by style. So we've honestly created hundreds of curated collections on the site that help guide people, whether that's modern farmhouse style, coastal style, living room lighting, these categories are honestly infinite. And I find that our website does a good job of guiding people through that journey.
We did a lot of card sorting, and we continue to do it when we make changes to our nav. So we'd send out a bunch of categories to people and ask them to group into whatever makes sense for them logically.
So let's say, shop by room should be its own category, where would they put living room lighting that lives within there?
So I think the journey is kind of pretty tailored to the challenges that our customers have online.
And then I guess in terms of your question with competing and competition, I think in general, furniture and lighting is just like a very not sexy industry. So when we built out our site, the competitors were using things in marketing that were used maybe 30 years ago, 20 years ago.
And even though a lot of them try to use things that we added to our website, we're always trying new things. A new feature comes out or a new tech app comes out, we'll use it. We'll implement it literally the next day. So we're always looking at what's next, what's next. And I think that's helped us quite a bit in terms of competition.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I mean, the way that you speak about asking your customers for feedback, having them answer surveys, building that stuff into the website. That kind of modern iterative approach to Ecommerce is definitely the way to get an edge over any competition.
And especially, larger brands move a lot slower because there's way more red tape. So, if you can be agile and like you said at the beginning of the conversation, fail fast and pivot, that's the name of the game.
Tanya Mykhaylova
100%.
I will say though, in terms of working for a family business, it is a bit scary sometimes like to invest in certain things and take certain risks, especially with the Ecomm channel of business. I really have the go ahead on what new features to roll out, what new tech firms to partner with.
So it is a little bit scary to make these drastic changes or try things that nobody uses in our industry. But so far, it has worked for us quite well, that approach.
Chase Clymer
Do you find yourself in interesting conversations where you have to find ways to say, “You're wrong, the data says so,”?
Tanya Mykhaylova
Haven't come across that yet. In fact, I think we just kind of try things and then the management would be surprised that those things are either sold online or are working. And then they would ask, “Hey, since when did we have this?”
I could see how a lot of family businesses, even friends that I have, have those challenges day to day. But I think because our Ecomm section of business is completely separate from retail right now, we have to go ahead on a lot of things, which is nice.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
That's one of the first conversations we have with clients when we were working with them for conversion rate optimization. We're just like, “Hey, there's no gods but data here. Your opinion is great, but the data says otherwise. The data wins. We're all in agreement here.”
Because there's a lot of interesting people out there where they want to be right, even if it costs them $1.
Tanya Mykhaylova
Yeah. That's for sure. When I worked in consulting, every client every day would complain about stuff like that. And we're like, “That's literally not... It's not gonna work.”
Chase Clymer
My favorite is when people complain about things not being on brand when it's like, you guys aren't even a brand. You make less than a million dollars a year. No one knows you are. Let's try things.
All right, Tanya. Now we've talked a lot about all the cool things that you're doing over there. Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience today?
Tanya Mykhaylova
I think a big tip that I would have is to... Well, actually, I use this in day to day life too. Something that you have an idea of or like a list of things you want to try in the future, honestly, just do them today. Try them today.
If you're thinking about trying SMS marketing, try it literally today. Test it out. Get it done. You don't have to put things off until the next day because if you test it today and you see it's working, you could potentially be onto something great for the company.
So that would be my biggest takeaway, I think.
Chase Clymer
Be action-oriented. That's my favorite type of person. Just do it. Why do we have to think about it too hard?
Tanya Mykhaylova
For sure.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Tanya, you talked about the awesome products that you guys carry there.
If I am living in North America and I'm looking for some of those things, where should I go? What should I do? You should go to casadiluce.ca. And actually, let me know how the journey is treating you because I think we've done quite a good job at guiding customers to their ideal light.
But I see you getting one of our whimsical pieces, like a cool dinosaur light. Or banana light. You should check them out.
Chase Clymer
I do need a dinosaur light. That'd be pretty cool. Awesome. Tanya, thank you so much for coming on.
Tanya Mykhaylova
Thanks, Chase. Have a good one.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Until next time!