DAILY SABAH - Beyond borders: Female entrepreneurs turn into digital exporters
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The retired architect and fashion-loving entrepreneur Bilge Can has always enjoyed combining items of Turkish origin and making her own embroidered pieces as a hobby. Noticing the lack of sustainable pieces representing her own culture in the fashion world, Can decided to establish the award-winning fashion brand, AnatolianCraft, in 2016, which designs and makes hand-embroidered and luxurious shoes and accessories made of ethically sourced local materials.
Can, with the help of her daughter Begüm Can Öcal, not only promotes eco-friendly slow fashion but also uses her brand to support local female artisans and assures that they are getting their fair compensation for their work.
This duo has created global brand awareness with customers all over Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East using their professional Facebook and Instagram accounts.
“Meta technologies have been and continue to be a very important factor in facilitating our production activities, marketing and sales activities,” says Öcal.
The team uses Meta Business Manager to publish their content to protect the image they create on all social channels of their businesses. Through posts, Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories, they showcase their new products, promote collaborations with celebrities and provide information about their production processes. As a result, they realize 90% of their sales thanks to the Meta technologies and websites.
Can and Öcal, in addition to their organic content, create Facebook ads to expand their reach and put forward their posts and dynamic creative ads. They are learning how people interact with websites using Meta Pixel. For instance, when they realized that the value of a shopping basket of a customer in the Middle East is higher, they created Special Target Audiences to find people in this region.
Communicating with their customers and artisan communities is vital to their success, and to do this, the duo uses Meta messaging tools such as Instagram Direct and WhatsApp. All their interactions with collaborators take place via WhatsApp, while their customers contact them via Instagram Direct for product requests. The team receives an average of 10 messages a day through the platform.
Can, who was not very active on the internet before the pandemic, was selling most of her products through a local concept store. When the enterprises began to close and Öcal became involved in the brand, they began to devote more time to their Meta profiles. They started using Meta Business Manager to create advertising campaigns more often.
In the future, they hope to open their own physical store and grow their family of artists. At the same time, they plan to create their own WhatsApp Business account for all professional chats, as well as further highlight their presence on Instagram.
