The mamaky diary

We’re almost 4 months old!

Hi Mamaky Members,

Almost 4 incredible months have already passed since we’ve launched. As it marks a big milestone for us, I thought I’d take the time to personally write you all an email to tell you what we’ve been up to.

First of all, thank you very much for being a Member. You’ve helped us reach 15,000 members on our site, which exceeds our goal of 12,000 members. It’s a great start for us, and we’re going to make sure we do our part to sell you things you’ll love.

What We’ve Done
In 4 months, we’ve offered 23 Brands and over 200 different items in our store. We brought 14 of those Brands into Taiwan for the first time, and Mamaky members were the first parents in Taiwan to have access to them. Before this summer, you’ll see 11 more new Brands that we’ve picked out from Baby shows we’ve attended in the US. All are high-quality Brands with items we’re very impressed with.

Since launch, we’ve been operating in a quiet period. That means we’ve done very limited advertising, mainly to focus on improving our logistics process and on becoming faster in resolving Member issues. Each morning, my team and I spend 10 minutes reviewing every single new and open issue. We talk about what to do, and then we give ourselves 12 hours to reply to the member with exactly what we’re going to do. So as you can see, we’re serious about ensuring you get what you want smoothly and without mistakes.

What’s Next?
In the next few weeks, you’ll see some new product categories that we’ll be covering. To help keep your kids busy through the summer, we have some wonderful Books and Educational Toys to keep your kid’s minds busy and inspired through the summer. To help you transition them into the warm temperatures, we have some very stylish organic t-shirts that we’re excited to introduce. I’m also very excited to introduce a line of Organic Baby Shampoos and Lotion all made with natural ingredients that are 10 times better than the chemical-lade baby shampoos made by the big companies. To keep the store fun and fresh, we’ll continue offering creative items that are hard to find in Taiwan, such as the kid’s Nail Paints and the Butterfly Wings that quickly sold out last month. Feel free to message us about what other items you want to see at johnny.wong@mamaky.com.

We’ll also begin our push to advertise and promote Mamaky so that more parents know about us. To date, we’ve only been advertising on Facebook which is probably how you heard about us. In the next few months, we’ll be extending our advertising to other websites and media channels. In fact, one of our items will appear on a game show called “xxxx”, which will be fun for us to watch. Most importantly though, we want to ask you to help us by telling your friends and family about Mamaky. We’ll even give you a piece of the sales from their first purchase! You can do that now by going here to use a new feature we quietly introduced last month where you receive $150nt if your friends sign up and make a purchase. Click here http://www.mamaky.com/invite/?credit=show.

Lastly, we’re also looking to invite bloggers to join our Blog Program that we’re currently designing. If you’re a blogger, or a writer, and are curious about what this is, please write to yun@mamaky.com. You’ll become part of the Mamaky Blog network where you can become the first few parents to review new products never sold in Taiwan before, and in turn, our members will be able to read about it on your wonderful blogs!

Jobs at Mamaky
We’re currently hiring for the following positions:

1. Experienced Designer [Full-Time]
2. Experienced PHP Developer with Magento experience [Full-Time]
3. Online Advertising (3-month contract job)
4. Summer Intern (2-month program)

If you’re interested or know people that are, please contact me at johnny.wong@mamaky.com.

A Special Announcement
I’d like to introduce Ashley to all of you, as she is my newborn baby that my wife and I had last month. I feel very blessed and lucky that she is healthy and beautiful.

We Want To Hear From You
If you have any feedback on products, our website, our customer service, email me at johnny.wong@mamaky.com

If you have ideas that you think would work really well for us, again, please email me. We’d love to hear from you.

Toy Fair wrap up

Wow, what a 3 days it was. Really, one thing about these gigantic fairs, is you had better get your feet massaged at the end of each day because there is alot of walking to do. I am sure we covered more than 3 miles in total, rarely sitting down, and talking and hand-shaking all day. I love it really, but at the same time, we’re all ready to sleep for two days. Whew! I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t glad it was over. However, we’ve totally met our goal, and are walking away from this show with many wonderful Brands lined up ready to work with us. So that gets me very excited, because it brings us closer to our goal at Mamaky: hundreds of innovative and quality Brands to our members, at low prices.

All in all, what I really got from these 3 days was continuing to learn more about the toy business. Talking to retailers and Brands, we learned quite a few trade secrets, which shows we needed to attend each year, and what to look for.

I feel very ready for 2013, the year of the snake.

Day 1 of the biggest Toy Fair on earth

At least it sure feels like it! Ok, actually it is close, it is the largest in the Western Hemisphere, 2nd to the Nuremberg Toy Fair. Now that is a toy fair we would love to go, to get deals done while we also tour Germany and eat wonderful food!

So this is the 2nd year for Mamaky at this show. And like the first year, the immensity of the show blew us away. It takes up the entire two floors of the Jacob Javitz convention space, packed end to end with the coolest toys, gadgets, and games you’ll ever see. It is a kids wildest dream come true, to come here and walk the aisles all day.

Yet, the weirdest thing about these shows is that it’s packed with businessmen, buyers, and execs, and not a kid in sight. It’s expected of course, but somehow all the creativity and imagination seems a bit misplaced. At least it seems that way until you start walking around, and you start noticing that many of these people are really into it as well! There’s something very refreshing to see a bunch of grownup men and women dressed in work attire, to be so openly in touch with the kid in them! It makes me love what I do so much more.

So we came here laser focused, being aware of the clock so that we could uncover as many potential brands to offer on Mamaky. I’m quite excited of the discussions we’ve started with many of the brands, including Kidcraft which makes the most beautiful play-kitchen sets on the market. My daughter Kylie owns one (see the February post in 2012) too. Edushape is another very creative Brand that we’re talking to, which makes some really fun and creative bath toys for kids that I’ve not seen on the market before. There are a number of other companies, but I won’t name each one here.

So we’ve got another two days to go. I’ll be sure to post all the pictures from the show later.

NY International Gift Fair - Baby / Kids

We attended the annual NYIGF, where companies big and small come to showcase the newest and greatest in products.

As usual with these shows, we come back being overwhelmed by the hundreds of wonderful Brands that we think Mamaky members would love. And even after a week later, we’re still sifting through the catalogs! But it’s so much fun because we talk to these Brands, tell them what we do, ask them if they want to be a part of our journey. We get to know some of the owners very well, to a point some we even want to be friends with and have dinner! But really, most of these Brands are immediately open to the idea of working together, and helping us bring to you their best products.

We hope you think we’re headed in the right direction. We’re completely focused on finding the right Brands for you, and to getting them at the best prices possible. You’ll also see in the next few months that we’ll be expanding the product categories that you’ll see from us, from nail paint, to baby body care, and quite possibly to foods. Its exciting times really as we’re willing to try anything thats possible.

Remember, it’s our mission to make sure that you’re never paying unnecessary pricing markups on imported Brands.

Here are some photos from the show

Taipei is beautiful. But we’ve got 2 much work to do!

We’ve been working out of Neihu at a friend’s office, and our daily commute has been beautiful. Taipei really is such a beautiful city, because it is surrounded by super green, and tall mountains. Especially this month, with all the wind and rain, we are looking at blue skies and white, dramatic clouds that float on those mountains. It’s truly breathtaking.

So, besides admiring the beauty of Taipei, our past 3 weeks here have been spent working 12 hour days preparing for our launch. Things are delayed because we underestimated our need for new hires to manage our backend operations. It’s tough for us because we know you’ve been waiting for a while now, and we hate to disappoint you!! 

But at the same time, do know the setup of our operations is almost complete (and very solid),and we’re quite excited to press the ‘Start’ button.

There’s been a million things to do, some fun, and some not so fun.

Not so fun - 大章 and 小章 - we’ve probably spent about 2 hours in total, just having to keep driving back to our office to pick up these stamps, because we’re constantly leaving them behind whenever we’re on our way to sign contracts. “Ai Yo Ya!!”

Fun - looking for an office (-in Neihu).

Not so fun - labels and label printer - all products that we’ll bring through customs requires a Chinese Label. We’ve gone back and forth too many times with Customs, trying to determine an acceptable format for the label, and trying to argue that we’re not able to get the factory address of many of these US Brands. At the same time, we had to spend a good amount of money buying a label printer, and then spent some time learning how to use it too.  We’ve finally got it both down, but it took too long.

The address and phone number are blurred because they are not the official ones for Mamaky

Fun - Touring Warehouses - Some have been impressive, and some have been downright horrible. Here’s one of the impressive warehouse/fulfillment facilities that we’re really looking to use. It helped that during the tour, we got to eat a Taiwan ‘Pork Bien-Dang’ for lunch and it was really really yummmmy!

Fun - Receiving sample products! Here’s two of the hundreds and hundreds of products that we’ll be selling (soon!). 

So we hope you’ve enjoyed the glimpse into what we’re doing right now. 

Take care for now.