Zarah Hartung’s baby clothing and gift site Cherishme.ie recently received a ‘Silver Star’ award at the Mumpreneur Conference and Awards in the UK and is soon to target German-speaking markets.
Set up in October last year, Cherishme.ie specialises in the sale of Fairtrade and organic baby clothing as wellas a wide range of accessories and unique baby gifts, many of which are not currently available on the high street.
Having initially marketed her new online business towards the Irish domestic market, Hartung noticed a steady growth in sales coming from customers throughout Europe, the US and Australia.
As a result of this she carried out further research into the export market and identified a gap in the German market for her products, many of which are currently still unavailable there.
Working with local enterprise board
She is currently working with the support of the South Dublin County Enterprise Board to develop a German version of her online store which is due to go live in the next few weeks.
“I discussed the idea with my husband who is German (and the designer of my website), and we decided to launch a German version of our store, specifically targeted towards the large German, Swiss and Austrian market,” said Hartung.
“With 60pc of our website traffic coming from generic Google searches, one of the advantages of having the site in German is that it becomes indexed and visible in German web searches too, making it easier to market the website in central Europe.”
The key element in developing the online store was to create a visually appealing and easy to navigate platform for individuals to shop online for a wide range of baby products.
Some additional features of the website include a gift wrapping service as well as an ‘live online tracking page’, which allows you to continuously track the progress of your parcel once your order has been placed.
Article courtesy of Bizstartup.ie